Libraries and Schools Author:Samuel Swett Green Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: make a profession of journalism this is a perfectly well known fact; and any one who doubts it may satisfy himself on the subject almost any day by a few words o... more »f inquiry at a news-stand. Mr. Souther, in this town, I fancy, could impart to any of you, who happen to be curious, a considerable amount of information under this head. A little learning is proverbially a dangerous thing; and the less the learning the greater the danger. Let us recur, then, to my cardinal proposition, that the great end of all school education is to make people able to educate themselves. You start them; that is all the best teacher can do. Whether he is called a professor and lectures to great classes of grown men at a university, or is a country school-master who hammers rudiments into children, he can do no more than this; but this every teacher, if he chooses, can do. How very few do it though ! Not one out of ten ;— scarcely one out of twenty. It is here our system fails. I do not know that what I am about to suggest has ever been attempted anywhere, but I feel great confidence that it would succeed ; therefore, I would like to see it attempted in Quincy. Having started the child by means of what we call a common-school course,—having, as it were,learned it to walk,—the process of further self- education is to begin. The great means of self- education is through books—through much reading of books. But in our system of instruction there is just here a missing link. In our schools we teach children to read;—we do not teach them how to read. That, the one all-important thing,— the great connecting link between school-education and self-education,—between means and end,—that one link we make no effort to supply. As long as we do not make an effort to supply it, our school system in its result is ...« less