We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making
the most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this
village does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my
townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance
either of us. We need to be provoked -- goaded like oxen, as we
are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent system of common
schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-starved
Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library
suggested by the State, no school for ourselves. We spend more on
almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental
aliment. It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not
leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is
time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants
the fellows of universities, with leisure -- if they are, indeed, so
well off -- to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.
Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever?
Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under
the skies of Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to
us? Alas! what with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we
are kept from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected.
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