Excerpt from Normal Schools, and Other Institutions, Agencies, and Means, Designed for the Professional Education of Teachers, Vol. 2: Europe

In conclusion, it may save some misapprehension of his own views to remark, that with all these agencies for theeducation and improvement of teachers, the public schools of Europe, with their institutions of government and so ciety, do not turn out such practical and efficient men as our own common schools, acting in concert with our religious, social, and political institutions. A boy educated in a district school of New England, taught for a few months in the winter, by a rough, half-educated but live teacher, who is earning his way, by his winter's work in the school-room out of the profession into something which will pay better, and in the summer by a young female, just out of the oldest class of the winter school, and with no other knowledge of teaching than what she may have gathered by observation of the diverse practices of some ten or twelve instructors, who must have taught the school under the intermittent and itinerating system which prevails universally in the coun try districts of New England - a boy thus taught through his school life, but subjected at home and abroad, to the stirring influences of a free press, of town and school dis triet meetings, of constant intercourse with those who are mingling with the world, and in the affairs of public life, and beyond all these influences, subjected early to the whole some discipline, both moral and intellectual, of taking care of himself, and the affairs of the house and the farm, will have more capacity for business, and exhibit more intellectual activity and versatility than the best scholar who ever graduated from a Prussian school, but whose school life, and especially the years which immediately follow, are sub jected to the depressing and repressing influences of a des potie government, and to a state of society in which every thing is fixed both by law and the iron rule of custom. But this superiority is not due to the school, but is gained in spite of the school. Our aim should be to make the school better, and to bring all the influences of home and society, of religion and free institutions, into perfect harmony with the best teaching of the best teacher.

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