ADAM & CHARLES BLACK: LONGMAN & CO., ORR & SMITH, SHERWOOD, GILBERT, & PIPER, MDCCCXXXVI. 2-5-32 HQ W PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. A deep conviction and solemn feeling of the necessity -the urgency-of a great National measure for enlightening, and morally elevating, the great body of our countrymen, are the author's motives for offering the following pages to the deliberate consideration of the public. Whether they shall think his views juster and more practical than those that may have been before them, in a hundred other works on the "interminable theme of education," it is not for him to anticipate; but he ventures to hope that they will find the subject placed in a light somewhat different from any with which they are already familiar. He appeals to the Crisis—a great increase of popular power, an immense extension of popular influence, without commensurate directing knowledge and controlling virtue; and he claims a patient hearing, as the right of the humblest contributor to the difficult subject, to receive, and the duty of every wellwisher of his country and his species, to bestow. In this treatise the reader's attention will be called to larger views of the vi PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. subject of education, in its principles and practice, than he may have met with before, and that in relation to ALL classes of the community, for the education of man, adapted to his nature, knows no distinction of ranks; but he will likewise, it is humbly hoped, see the limit defined, to which the education of every sane human being ought to be carried, in order to fit him for that place in the social system, and in the creation of God, for which he was called into being. With the diffidence becoming the attempt, and the deference due to his masters in the science of national economy, the author has ventured to propose a PLAN of popular education for public judgment and legislative adoption; content if it shall move that discussion, by which it cannot fail to be greatly improved. He will be more than enough rewarded, too, if he shall succeed in reviving some share of interest in the neglected subject of the philosophy of Man, and his relations to external things, without which the science of education must remain, as it has hitherto remained, incapable of practical application, and therefore a discarded weariness. He repeats that the object presses, that it is exciting anxious inquiry,-and that it is shortly destined to rouse the attention of the most careless and inobservant dweller in the land. EDINBURGH, 5th April 1834. PREFACE ΤΟ THE SECOND EDITION. THE subject of Education being progressive, and increased attention having been given to it since the date of the first edition of this work, it is none of the least of the advantages of a new edition, that it can illustrate principles from the latest cases of an extending experience. Of this the author has not failed to avail himself; and while he has added to the number of his facts, he has modified and corrected some of his statements. On the whole he feels himself on stronger ground than that on which he stood before. Encouraged to anticipate a wider circulation, he has, by closer letterpress, by a trifling curtailment in the size of the volume, and by dispensing with the treatises on Criminal Legislation and Homicidal Insanity, which may appear in a separate form, he has been enabled considerably to reduce the price of the work. |