Is it not an expensive process, that thus amasses a certain quantity of knowledge at cost of the disposition, sometimes of the ability, to add to it through the whole of life?  Really, schooling is short, and, contrasted with it, life is long; but what mischiefs may not the latter experience from the former!  Let us clearly conceive, once, the aversion many of our boys and girls persistently feel toward the school, and of their leaving it, at the last, with rejoicing!  Are we astonished that when they have fairly escaped, frivolity is, with the young woman, too apt to replace mental culture, and with the young man, vulgarity or exclusive living for ‘the main chance?’ That the men and women so educated are too receptive, credulous, pliant and unstable; that in too large a degree they lack discrimination, judgment, and the good sense and executive talent which plan understandingly, and work without sacrifice of honor, manhood, or spiritual culture, to a true success?  But, if our instructors could find out, or if some other could find out for them, just how and by what steps it is that the young mind engages with nature and harvests knowledge, and if they should see, therefore, how to strike in better with the current of the young, knowing and thinking, to move with it, enlarge, direct and form it aright, properly insuring that the mind under their charge shall do its own work, and hence advance by consecutive and comprehended steps, we ask with confidence whether much of the notorious short-comings now manifest in the results of our patient efforts might not be replaced by an approach toward an intellectual activity, furnishing, completeness, and bent, more worthy of the name and the idea of education?  We are not alone in questioning the tendencies of existing methods.  Other pens have raised the note of alarm.  Speaking on the character of the product of the English schools, Faraday says, ’The whole evidence appears to show that the reasoning faculties [mark, it is here the failure occurs, and here that it shows itself], in all classes of the community, are very imperfectly and insufficiently developed—­imperfectly, as compared with the natural abilities, insufficiently, when considered with reference to the extent and variety of information with which they are called upon to deal.’  Does not this strong language find equally strong warrant in current facts of individual conduct and of our social life?

That there is yet no recognized complete method in, and no ascertained science of education, the latest writings on the subject abundantly reiterate and confirm.  The best of our annual School Reports, and the most recent treatises,—­among which, notwithstanding the abatement we must make for their having been, through adventitious circumstances, pushed in our country to a sudden and not wholly merited prominence, Sir.  Spencer’s republished essays may be named,—­while they acknowledge some progress