Page:A Plea for the Middle Classes.djvu/7



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You ask me about my school: the object of it, and its plan; both which I will give you in few words. The object of it is, to provide a good and complete education for the middle classes, at such a charge as will make it available to most of them. The need of such an undertaking must have suggested itself to many; but it will be impressed upon them more fully, if they only consider what miserably imperfect schools now abound all over the country; schools as devoid of sound principle as of sound knowledge;—the conductors of which have no other object in view than to secure a scanty subsistence by the credulity of that class of society which is unable to judge of the requirements necessary to make a competent schoolmaster. When the seventy-seventh, seventy-eighth, and seventy-ninth Canons were in force or fashion, the people had some guarantee for the qualifications of those who taught their children; but now, a statistical return would show that a very large number (perhaps a majority) of the present schoolmasters are persons who have failed in other pursuits, and have turned to this as their last resource. If this were not a matter of life and death, security to the state, peace to society, and the moral regeneration of the masses of the people, it might be endured as nothing more than one illustration of the sharpness which poverty gives to very sober wits; but as the political and moral