But when he could see in such
places their genial and reviving influences, their substituting of
the contemplation of the beauties of nature and art, and of the
wisdom of great men, for mere sensual enjoyment or stupid idleness-
-at any rate he would learn this--that it is at once the duty and
the interest of all good members of society to encourage and
protect them.
I took occasion to say at an Athenaeum in Yorkshire a few weeks
since, and I think it a point most important to be borne in mind on
such commemorations as these, that when such societies are objected
to, or are decried on the ground that in the views of the
objectors, education among the people has not succeeded, the term
education is used with not the least reference to its real meaning,
and is wholly misunderstood. Mere reading and writing is not
education; it would be quite as reasonable to call bricks and
mortar architecture--oils and colours art--reeds and cat-gut music-
-or the child's spelling-books the works of Shakespeare, Milton, or
Bacon--as to call the lowest rudiments of education, education, and
to visit on that most abused and slandered word their failure in
any instance; and precisely because they were not education;
because, generally speaking, the word has been understood in that
sense a great deal too long; because education for the business of
life, and for the due cultivation of domestic virtues, is at least
as important from day to day to the grown person as to the child;
because real education, in the strife and contention for a
livelihood, and the consequent necessity incumbent on a great
number of young persons to go into the world when they are very
young, is extremely difficult.
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