unless we drank of it, we were beaten, nor had we any sober judge to appeal to. And yet, I, O my God, in whose presence I now securely make this recollection, willingly learnt these things, and like a wretch delighted in them, and for this I was called a |good, hopeful boy|._” By this you may see what the judgment of this holy and venerable person was in his private retirements, and at the most serious intervals of his life, concerning the general course of those studies, which draw out the first runnings of our age, and which are of so great credit and authority in the world, as to go under the name of ingenious and liberal education. You see he not only disapproves them, but reckons them among those sins and irregularities of his youth, whereof he thought himself obliged to make a particular confession in this his great penetential. ♦ removed the word “of” per Errata 39. And here let me not be thought immodest, if upon great consideration and full conviction, I presume to tax the management of our publick schools. Many miscarriages I might note, but I shall concern myself only with those, which the principles here laid down lead me to consider. And these we may comprehend under two general heads of complaint. I. That they take up so much of our time. II. That they teach us such frivolous and unprofitable things as they do. In relation to the first, I can’t with any patience reflect, that out of so short a time as that of human life, consisting, it may be of 50 or 60 years (for where one lives longer, hundreds come short) 19 or 20 shall be spent between the dictionary and the lexicon, in hammering out a little _Latin_ and _Greek_, and in learning a company of poetical fictions and fantastick stories. Were these things worth knowing, yet ’tis barbarous and inhuman, to make people spend so much of their little stock of time upon them. This is to _make a cure_ of human ignorance, and to deal with the infirmities of the mind, as some ill surgeons do with the wounds of the body. If one were to judge of the life of man by the proportion of it spent at school, one would think the _Antidiluvian_ mark were not yet out, and that we had a prospect of at least 900 or 1000 years before us. The truth is, ’tis an intolerable abuse it should be so; and were the age as wise as it pretends to be, it would never suffer it: especially considering what late examples we have had of more compendious methods beyond the seas. It does not become me to project a scheme of school-discipline; I leave this to abler heads. Only in the mean time I may venture to say, that the common way is a very great tax upon human life; so large a portion of which can very ill be spared, to be lavished away in the first elements of learning.