The Irish Penny Journal, Vol. 1 No. 25, December 19, 1840Various
History
The Irish Penny Journal, Vol. 1 No. 25, December 19, 1840
Various
Ireland -- Periodicals
NECESSITY OF A THOROUGH EDUCATION.--Good education being a preparation
for social life, necessarily embraces the whole man--body, head, and
heart--for in social life the whole man is necessarily called into
exertion in one way or another almost every hour. But this is not
sufficient. There must be no preponderance, as well as no exclusion; a
limited or biassed education produces monsters. Some are satisfied with
the cultivation of a single faculty--some with the partial cultivation
of each. A child is trained up to working; he is hammered into a hardy
laborer--a stout material for the physical bone and muscle of the
state. This is good, so far as it goes; but it is bad, because it goes
no farther. He is not taught reading; he is not taught religion; above
all, he is not taught thinking. He never looks into his other self; he
soon forgets its existence; the man becomes all body; his intellectual
and moral being lies fallow. The growth of such a system will be a
sturdy race of machines--delvers and soldiers, but not men: so much
brute physical energy swinging loosely through society at the discretion
of those more spiritual natures to whom their education, neglected or
perverted in another way, gives wickedness with power, and teaches the
secrets of mind only as instruments to crush or bend men for their own
selfish purposes. Others educate the intellectual and moral being only;
the physical, once the building is raised, like an idle scaffolding,
is cast by. But the omission is injurious--often fatal: malady is laid
up, in all its thousand forms, in the infant and the child. It spreads
out upon the man. When his spirit is in the flush of its strength, and
his moral rivals his intellectual nature in compass and power, then it
is that the despised portion of his being rises up and avenges itself
for this contempt. The studious man feels, as he walks down life, a
thousand minute retaliations for the prodigal waste of his youthful
vigour. The body bows down beneath the burden of the mind; it wears
gradually away into weakness and incompetency; clouds of sickness,
pangs of pain, obscure, distort, weigh it to the earth. Health is not
a thing of organization only, but of training; it is to be laid up bit
by bit. We are to be _made_ healthy--tutored and practised into health.
Omit health in favour of the intellectual and moral faculties, and
you provide instruments, it is true, for mind, but instruments which,
when wanted, cannot be used. Intellectual and moral education may rank
before physical, but they are not more essential; the physical powers
are the hewers of wood and the drawers of water for the spiritual. The
base of the column is in the earth; but, without it, neither could the
shaft stand firm above it, nor the capital ascend to the sky.--_Wyse on
Education._
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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