Granting, however, all that has now been said in palliation of existing defects in education, that the whole business is a thing remote from immediate interests, and not less so from immediate perceptions and reasonings—­a thing that, to all eyes capable of seeing in it something more than so many days devoted to spelling, penmanship, and arithmetic, begins at once to recede from the vision, and to lie in the hazy distance, obscure and incomprehensible—­granting all this, and yet any one who realizes what education is, a formative and determining process, that for so many years is to operate persistently upon the plastic and intrinsically priceless mind, will assuredly be surprised in view of the actually existing indifference about questions as to the method or methods by which the work can most fully and satisfactorily be accomplished.  We have enacted laws, built school-houses, provided libraries, employed teachers, and in a tolerable degree insisted on the attendance of pupils, duly equipped with treatises of knowledge.  We have lavished money on a set of instrumentalities, more or less vaguely considered requisite to insure qualification of the young for active life, and the perpetuity of the national virtue and liberty.  What we, in America, however, have least essayed and most needed, has been to get beneath the surface of the great educational question; to look less after plans of school buildings, and the schemes of school-districts and funds, and more into the structure of the lessons and studies, and the relationships, applications, and value of the ideas secured or attempted during the daily sessions of the school classes.  It will be a great day for us, when our principals and schoolmasters cease to put forward so prominently, at the end of the quarter or term, its smartest compositions and declamations, and when the over-generous public shall begin to attend on ‘examinations’ with a less allowance of eyes and ears, and a more vigorous and active use of the discriminating and judging powers of their own minds.  In the externals of education, England, France, and Germany must take rank after some of the States of our country; but in the matter of seeking the right interior qualities and tendencies of instruction, they have been in advance of us; though just now the anti-progressive spirit of their governments is interposing itself to hinder the largest practicable results by the schools, and to what extent it will emasculate them of their best qualities, time only can show.  Among our teaching class, the apathy is not confined to the ill-rewarded incumbents of the lower positions; with rare exceptions, it is even more decided at the other extreme of the scale.  Of all the gentlemen holding place in our over-numerous college faculties, and commanding, one would expect, the very passes to the terra incognita of the human soul, how few seem disposed to prove their individual faculties by any thoroughgoing and successful incursions into unknown regions of the psychologic and pedagogic realm!  The spirit of this should-be influential and leading class among us is one of serene assent in the iteration of the old steps, with of course some minor improvements, but with no attempts at a grand investigation and synthesis, such as gave to philosophy her new method, and to the world her growing fruitage of physical sciences.