This office for the mind acquaintance with literature can alone
perform. So that, in school, literature is not only, as I have said, the
easiest open door to all else desirable, the best literature is not only
the best means of awakening the young mind, the stimulus most congenial,
but it is the best foundation for broad and generous culture. Indeed,
without its co-ordinating influence the education of the common school is
a thing of shreds and patches. Besides, the mind aroused to historic
consciousness, kindled in itself by the best that has been said and done
in all ages, is more apt in the pursuit, intelligently, of any specialty;
so that the shortest road to the practical education so much insisted on
in these days begins in the awakening of the faculties in the manner
described. There is no doubt of the value of manual training as an aid in
giving definiteness, directness, exactness to the mind, but mere
technical training alone will be barren of those results, in general
discriminating culture, which we hope to see in America.
The common school is a machine of incalculable value. It is not, however,
automatic. If it is a mere machine, it will do little more to lift the
nation than the mere ability to read will lift it. It can easily be made
to inculcate a taste for good literature; it can be a powerful influence
in teaching the American people what to read; and upon a broadened,
elevated, discriminating public taste depends the fate of American art,
of American fiction.
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