Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/209

Rh Tho design of the common school is to take children at the proper ago from their mothers, and give them the most indispensable development, intellectual, moral, affectional, and religious; to furnish thorn with as much positive useful knowledge as they can master, and, at the same time, teach them the three great scholastic helps or tools of education—the art to read, to write, and calculate.

Tho children of most parents are easily brought to school, by a little diligence on tho part of the teachers and school committee; there are also children of low and abandoned, or at least affected parents, who live in a state of continual truancy; there are found on the banks of your canals, they swarm in your large cities. When those children become men, through lack of previous development, instruction and familiarity with these three instruments of education, they cannot receive the full educational influence of the State and church, of business and the press; they lost their youthful education, and therefore they lose, in consequence, their manly culture. They remain dwarfs, and are barbarians in the midst of society; there will be exceptional men whom nothing can make vulgar; but this will be the lot of the mass. They cannot perform the intelligent labour which business demands, only the brute work; so they lose the development which, comes through the hand that is active in the higher modes of industry, which, after all, is the greatest educational force. Accordingly, they cannot compete with ordinary men, and remain poor; lacking also that self-respect which comes of being respected, they fall into beggary, into intemperance, into crime; so, from being idlers at first, a stumbling-block in the way of society, they become paupers, a positive burden which society must take on its shoulders; or they turn into criminals, active foes to the industry, the order, and the virtue of society.

Now if a man abandons the body of his child, the State adopts that body for a time; takes the guardianship thereof, for the child's own sake; sees that it is housed, fed, clad, and cared for. If a man abandons his child's spirit, and the child commits a crime, the State, for its own. mike, assumes the temporary guardianship thereof, and puts him in a gaol. When a man deserts his child, taking no concern about his education, I venture to make the sugges-