Excerpt from The Princeton Review, Vol. 16: October, 1844

Laded as to conceive that because the President has pro nounced him to have reached his primum gradum artium, he has accomplished the whole work. No sooner is the youth released from school and transferred to the drawing room or the apprenticeship than the school books are thrown aside. The idea of reviewing and continuing the studies, of which the elements were learned in school, is not indulged, or is repelled as pedantic. The mind is now devoted to the erudition of the centre-table and the circulating library, the sentimental annual and Lady's Books, the bombastic romance and fustian poem, or as the highest grasp of intel lect, the short and easy reading of a quarterly review. Or perhaps even this is deemed to require too much time, and the boy is required to stick to his trade and the girl to her housewifery, so constantly as to shut out all opportunity of learnin g or reading. Thus the very means of strengthening and improving the mind are either frittered away or wholly neglected; the education of the school is lost for want of its steady improvement as the capacity of improvement en larges, and the occasions for its use multiply, so that at length it becomes no unusual thing for a lady to be ashamed to have to pen a note, lest she should discover her forgetfulness of the orthography of the language, and shrink from the com putation of her bills that require the higher figures of the multiplication-tables or the rules of Reduction. As her children rise up around her, their nightly array of atlas, arithmetic and grammar recall old associations, but alas! When she would give them help, she finds that every thing has strangely altered since she looked at such matters. There are new hemispheres and unknown continents the earth has more than four quarters; there are odd ways of calculating sums, and strange rules of syntax; and she gives up in despair and shame. If the young scholars turn to their father with their difficulties he begs off by pleading the time that has elapsed since he looked at a school-book, or the more important items of his business which demand all his thoughts at home as well as at the counting-house. These are homely illustrations of the way in which the intellect is neglected, and of the practical consequences of such neglect. If we pursue the inquiry in other forms, shall we not find the same result? How many books are in our private libraries? What are they? How much are they read? How often is the family-group entertained.

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