“_How many years of life are spent in learning Latin? How much labor, pain and imprisonment, are endured by the boy? How much anxious drudgery by the master? How much disgust of literature is engendered?_ How many habits are formed of reluctance to regular employment? In short, how much misery has been produced, is being produced, and will continue to be produced, in teaching the Latin language? This appears to us to be a very important question, and will, we think, appear so to our readers, after a little consideration. “We sometimes figure to ourselves an inhabitant of another world coming among us, and examining with an unprejudiced eye the _value_ of our pursuits. If this idle speculation could be realized, who, we should be glad to know, would be Quixotic enough to undertake a defence of the usual course of instruction in Latin? Nobody, certainly. For, in the first place, not two boys out of three who follow it, ever become able _to read even the easier classic authors with fluency_. Of these, perhaps one half, from the painful associations which they have attached to Latin books, never open one after they leave school. If we add to the account, as Rousseau would, the numbers who die during the schoolboy age, we shall find the list of those who use the knowledge, gained with so much pain to master and scholar, dwindle into a very small one.”—_Essay on Public Education, p. 12. London, 1822._ “I object to the practice of sending, almost indiscriminately, every male child, whose parents are above the laboring class of the people, to undergo the painful {559} drudgery of committing to memory the rules of a Latin Grammar, and _to sacrifice four of the years of his existence to a pursuit which is ultimately to be of no service to him_.”—_Russel's View of the Scotch System of Education, p. 85._ “Does it savor of our characteristic sagacity to send almost every boy of a certain age, to a grammar school, to learn the elements of Latin, and afterwards to enter him to business, with no other qualifications for it than those which he may have derived from a partial and ill-directed attention to writing and accounts?”—_Idem, p. 79._