“2. To create a desire for inquiry should be the chief aim in the acquisition of an education; and the development of this desire you greatly frustrate or positively prevent by demanding your children in your public schools to study just such branches at just such times. From personal experience you well know that we do not always desire to do the same thing at the same time. No one can, therefore, prescribe an agreeable and useful course of study for another. You as adults would, no doubt, fiercely remonstrate against the enforcement of such an order, yet you impose it on your children with impunity and with an air of apparent duty. “3. Children who have been kept quiet and silent, like you keep them in your so-called school-rooms for a disagreeable length of time, become, when set at liberty, rude, boisterous and noisy. That is the reason why your school-grounds, when the pupils during recess are at play, are such loud, rude, disgusting places. The artificially pent-up vitality is overflowing its banks. Thus by the very method by which you intend to make your children kind, cultivated and refined, you actually make them cruel, uncultivated and boisterous. Now let us not forget that all these defects lie at the very _foundation_ of your public school system and are entirely invisible to all superficial observers. “4. When _many_ pupils like you have in your school buildings are, after recess, demanded to come into the school-room immediately after the ringing of the bell, or other signal, they, for want of time and convenience of cleaning their shoes, rush in regardless of dust and mud. This conduct and habit make children very indifferent and careless of personal order and cleanliness. “5. Your public school-rooms also cause your children to grow disorderly and indifferent for want of proper conveniences. Many of your schools require pupils to use paper for all their written work, but schools provide no waste baskets or other receptacles for the waste paper. As a natural consequence the waste paper is generally dropped on the floor. This tends to create a habit of disorder and carelessness, just the opposite of what you endeavor to impart.