Excerpt from The Necessity and Means of Improving the Common Schools of Connecticut

The results of this school system, were great and good. Every hamlet in Connecticut of no more than twenty houses, whether spread out upon the plain, or crowded into the valley, whether sprinkled along the sloping hill-side, or wedged in among the brown rocks of some wild ravine, could show its district school-house, which was regularly Opened for many months in the year. There was hardly to be known the son or daughter of Connecticut, who could not read and write. It was the rarest of all things to see one who had not received a good elementary education.

This was reported to the honor of Connecticut throughout the Christian world. The lover of his race, who had been rewarded for his zeal for the elevation of his countrymen, by a life-lease in a Prussian or Austrian dungeon, saw his prison wall all light about him when he thought of the one government in the world that had provided efficiently for the education of the humblest child, and gathered hope for the time, when his government and all governments should do the same. The surly and prejudiced Englishman, when he had said all the hard things that he could think of about America and the Yankees, could always be floored by one argument, and that was the Connecticut School Fund contrasted with the national debt of Great Britain. In our own Union, the other states were reprovedfor their negligence, and spurred on to their duty by the example of what Connecticut had been the first to perform. The emigrant mother in Vermont or Western New York, as she looked around upon her untaught boys and girls, sighed for the schools of Connecticut and was ready to exchange the rich fields that were beginning to look so luxuriant about her, for the most rocky farm within the limits of a Connecticut school district.

But within the last twenty years a change in all these respects has taken place. Connecticut no longer holds the same high position which she once did. Austria and Prussia have provided their subjects with an efi'icient and successful Common School system. Other governments in Europe are slowly awaking to their duty and interest in respect to the same high matter. Despotism even is striving to make peace with its wronged and outraged subjects, by giving, in return for the civil rights which it withholds, the substantial blessings of universal education. Many of the states of our own Union are giving themselves to this cause with a zeal and energy which show them determined to make amends for past neglect and torpor. In Massachusetts, Ohio, New York, Georgia, Rhode Island, and many other states, vigorous and successful efforts are made. School funds are accumulated; taxes are readily imposed and cheerfully paid; Boards of Education are instituted periodicals are circulated public lectures are given Normal Schools for the instruction of teachers are provided; teachers' conventions and Institutes are attended with zeal and profit. These, and other signs, show beyond question, that there is a strong movement in the public mind; that the people are being aroused. In some states and parts of states this interest is well-nigh enthusiastic.

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