“If the foregoing objections concerning your public schools are true, and I believe that all well-informed, unbiased persons will admit that, then your public schools are largely depriving your children of their individuality and self-reliance; the same as your military discipline largely deprived your men of their individuality and self-exertion during the military age. Your children, by being thus deprived of their individuality, independence and self-reliance, grow machine-like, and work only when they are set in motion by some parent, teacher, master, politician, clergyman, etc. Again, you largely instruct your children, either tacitly or avowedly, that manual labor is dishonorable. Many of your parents send their children to college until they are twenty or more years of age to get a little booklearning through a narrow, prescribed channel, under the influence of paternalism, which causes your young ladies and gentlemen to be little more than grown-up babies, without any practical experience and originality to grapple with the phenomena of life. As a rule, you stifle all independence and self-reliance in your child by paternalism and monopoly. “By such a course of instruction the child learns little or no manual labor during the whole of its ‘so-called school age.’ Physically it lives an idle life, and mentally it learns often much more superstition than facts. Not infrequently one can see your mothers do all, or nearly all, the domestic drudgery, and let their grown-up daughters live an idle life right in the same house. But how can the daughter do her fair share of the work as long as she is taught to look upon manual labor with contempt. In this manner you make slaves of your children, because labor, if not learned while young, will forever be unpleasant and disagreeable. This compels your children, then, to be either social parasites or industrial slaves to labor. You provide no incentives for children to labor. A portion of your children are employed almost exclusively at physical labor, the other portion at mental. “Your language is generally poor because your social conditions are such that good language is almost impossible. Your handwriting, as a rule, is very stiff, and often scarcely legible. Your ill-adjusted commercial system makes your mathematics so complicated that few even master the rudiments of your arithmetic.