PHILOSOPHY OF SELF-EDUCATION.

BY B. B. THATCHER.

Age of associations.

Result of civilization.

THIS is an age of associations. Almost every new enterprise, in whatever department, is carried through, or at least attempted, by a party, or a society, or a corporation, or an association under some other form and name. If a course of lectures is to be delivered, or a canal to be dug, -if an India-rubber factory is to be put up, or a vice or abuse in the community to be put down, the first movement, infallibly, is to call a meeting, and the second, to organize an institution, for the purpose. Combination is a characteristic of the age; and it is so in our own country more than in any other, by far. We are a people involved in the meshes of all sorts of associations, year in and year out. They scarcely leave us the liberty of breathing, without some society's vote, certified by the secretary thereof.

To a certain extent, this general state of things is necessarily the result and accompaniment of civilization. Men are gregarious in all conditions; in a condition of civilization more so than in barbarous communities; variously so in various civilized communities, according to circumstances innumerable; but of all others, most likely to be so, and likely to be most so, in precisely a country and a state of society like our own. The circumstances that produce this tendency need not be here detailed.

The social power.

Abuse of it.

Enough for our present argument, that the effect, and the fact, are as they are; that the spirit of the age is essentially and eminently a public spirit,-a spirit of enterprise, and combined enterprise,—a merging, in other words, of individuality in the social principle, (as ice is wasted away in a warm air;) and that the spirit of our country, for permanent reasons peculiar to itself, is the foremost representative and leader of the spirit of the age.

Great good results from this tendency; not great achievements only-moral and physical-beyond the reach of individual resources,-but great good. In this country, especially, as it is one of the consequences, so is it one of the causes,- -one of the chief ones,-of our unexampled prosperity. Our associations, great and small -in every department of society and life-from the Federal Union down to the least of all the organized operations of the bodies of men it includes-have carried everything before them. The world never has witnessed before such a development of the social power. But with the great things and good things which have resulted from its action-and still result-and still will-evil also, great evil, has been and will be mixed. Some of it is inevitable, and some of it incidental and needless, while yet another portion perhaps lies between these two classes. It is not wholly to be either prevented or remedied, but is greater than it need be. It admits of being guarded against to a certain extent; and for that reason, if for no other, it should be well understood.

We have alluded already to the amalgamating process in character (so to speak) which, under these influences, is going on among us; and that is the result we now particularly refer to as one to be kept in mind. It is the melting down of individuality in the floating character of the ambient community, and in the warm incumbent

Application of the subject to education.

To our country.

atmosphere of the age. There is danger that the enterprise of the age may be too high for its reflection; it should be a heavy ballast, and a sound hulk, to sustain such a breeze in the straining sails. There is danger that the mind which is vested in its enterprise is but too much taken from its reflection. There is danger that matter will occupy us disproportionately more than mind itself, it is a material, a mechanical, a money-making, as well as a social age; danger, that things, disproportionately more than men, will absorb our attention and our action; greater danger still, the greatest of all,— that of the men and of the mind, which do occupy us, far too large a portion, for our best good, will be other men, and other mind, to the exclusion and disparagement of ourselves, and of our own. It is more than danger. It is danger realized in injury, and fast being more so. The evil incident is becoming, almost as much as the great characteristic cause we have mentioned, one of the features of the country and the times.

Education is one of the grand investments of the reflection we have spoken of. The education of a generation of men best represents, on the whole, in the true sense of the words, the amount and quality of its reflection. In this department we may expect to see the surest and strongest manifestation of it, or of the want of it, or of its abuses. The education of the body politic is, as it were, its blood, and in it are sure to be seen, and to be shown, as by a thermometer, all the material changes which affect the system. This is, in one sense, eminently an age-the age-of Education. The enterprise of the age is displayed in nothing more than in its ostensible education. In our own country, again, this is especially the case. We have not pushed our canals and railroads with a more prodigious energy or a more subtle

Schemes of education.

Benevolent and religious.

ingenuity, than we have pushed our plans of education.

We refer, not only, of course, to those which are by everybody recognized and applied as such, and which bear the name, but to all that are in substance and spirit the same, be their name or form what they may. The Temperance Reform-originated among ourselves, as the application of steam to navigation was-is, as much as that is, one of the manifestations of the enterprise of the age; and that is a scheme for its education,—for the education of the intemperate and the temperate both,and these classes include the entire population. It is intended to instil and enforce a portion of science which is scarcely second to any other in importance, whether as a part of a complete theoretical education, or as a practice of daily life.

The Institutions, everywhere, formed for the Blind, and for the Deaf and Dumb, and for the Insane, and for Orphans, and for various other large classes of the most unfortunate of our species, most unfortunate especially in being most destitute by themselves of the materials of education, or of the means of using them,-all these are virtually branches of the same great scheme. They are Branch Banks of the system. They are general education adapted to the condition of particular classes, who without them must be mostly unsupplied.

So are all the missionary operations. So are all religious, at home as well as abroad. The fact that these, like the others, are not exclusively mere literary operations, or mostly so, or much so, or even not so at all, is of course no argument that they are not what we call them, unless it may be to those, if any there are, who hold substantially that "cyphering" ought to take precedence of civilization and christianity; or that this accomplishment and the like constitute the most essential part of them both;

Literary and popular.

All others.

and who must hold also, in the same spirit, that the elements of reflection and of religion-the elements of the philosophy of time and of eternity-the great objects of all education-are not to be taken into the account at all in comparison with "spelling made easy," and the the art of "going the gallopade." The truth is, that most of the benevolence of the age spends itself in education, or intends to do so. We need not add that

such is the purpose of the plans expressly so announced and applied; of the mighty system of common schools, which are the glory of these States; of the Academies, Seminaries, Institutes and Universities, which follow out their operations somewhat farther, for those who wish to do so; of all the variety of Infant, early, domestic operations, at the other end, which lead to them; of the High schools and Private schools, of infinite variety, collateral, and for the use of those who can afford to use them; of the Female schools, the Adult schools, the Manual-Labor schools, the Teachers' schools, and others designed for particular classes of the community in other similar situations peculiar to themselves; of the Navigation, Music, Drawing, Dancing, Riding, Fencing, Boxing, Swimming, Writing, Book-Keeping, Language, Painting, and other innumerable schools for the teaching of minute subdivisions of the general business of education, more or less useful, or useless, as the case may be; of the Athenæums, the Library Associations, the unions of professions and trades for analogous ends, the whole Lyceum System in all its ramifications and modes; of the operations for the diffusion of knowledge, or improvement of any kind, at large, or among the poor or other classes in particular; of every project, in a word, which the exhaustless benevolence and contrivance of this age of enterprise have been able to devise, nominally or actually,