{"content":[{"text":"READINGS ON STATE-INSTITUTED EDUCATION \n COMPILATION, 2000 \n Steven Alan Samson","bbox":{"left":0.198627,"top":0.087983,"width":0.6027520000000001,"height":0.07425899999999999}},{"text":"I.","bbox":{"left":0.35176,"top":0.180741,"width":0.014500000000000013,"height":0.02768799999999999}},{"text":"EARLY REFORM ERA","bbox":{"left":0.395676,"top":0.180741,"width":0.267173,"height":0.02768799999999999}},{"text":"PRO: Horace Mann (1841)","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.228362,"width":0.19946000000000003,"height":0.017317}},{"text":"The common school is the institution which can receive and train up children in the \n elements of all good knowledge and of virtue before they are subjected to the alienating \n competitions of life. This institution is the greatest discovery ever made by man: we repeat it, the \n common school is the greatest discovery ever made by man. In two grand, characteristic \n attributes, it is supereminent over all others: first, in its universality, for it is capacious enough to \n receive and cherish in its parental bosom every child that comes into the world; and, second, in \n the timeliness of the aid it proffers,--its early, seasonable supplies of counsel and guidance \n making security antedate danger. Other social organizations are curative and remedial; this is a \n preventive and an antidote. They come to heal diseases and wounds; this, to make the physical \n and moral frame invulnerable to them. Let the common school be expanded to its capabilities, let \n it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine-tenths of the crimes in the \n penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged; men \n would walk more safely by day; every pillow would be more inviolable by night; property, life, and \n character held by a stronger tenure; all rational hopes respecting the future brightened.","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.257551,"width":0.702717,"height":0.205978}},{"text":"--","bbox":{"left":0.205875,"top":0.475262,"width":0.010903999999999997,"height":0.017027999999999988}},{"text":"Common School Journal, vol. 3, no. 1, January 1841, p. 15.","bbox":{"left":0.264691,"top":0.475199,"width":0.43050999999999995,"height":0.01727899999999999}},{"text":"CON: Remarks by Allen W. Dodge, Report of the Committee on Education in the \n (Massachusetts) House of Representatives, March 18, 1840","bbox":{"left":0.147043,"top":0.504362,"width":0.619033,"height":0.031716999999999995}},{"text":"The true way to judge of the practical operations of the Board of Education is not merely \n to consult the statutes by which the Board is established, but also to examine its own reports. . . . \n A very cursory examination of these documents will suffice to show, that, so far from continuing \n our system of public instruction, upon the plan upon which it was founded, and according to which \n it has been so long and so successfully carried on, the aim of the Board appears to be, to \n remodel it altogether after the example of the French and Prussian systems. . . . \n Your Committee have already stated, that the French and Prussian system of public \n schools appears to have been devised, more for the purpose of modifying the sentiments and \n opinions of the rising generations, according to a certain government standard, than as a mere \n means of diffusing elementary knowledge. Undoubtedly, Common Schools may be used as a \n potent means of engrafting into the minds of children, political, religious, and moral opinions;--but, \n in a country like this, where such diversity of sentiments exists, especially upon theological \n subjects, and where morality is considered a part of religion, and is, to some extent, modified by \n sectarian views, the difficulty and danger of attempting to introduce these subjects into our \n schools, according to one fixed and settled plan, to be devised by a central Board, must be \n obvious. The right to mould the political, moral, and religious, opinions of his children, is a right \n exclusively and jealously reserved by our laws to every parent; and for the government to \n attempt, directly or indirectly, as to these matters, to stand in the parent's place, is an undertaking \n of very questionable policy.","bbox":{"left":0.147042,"top":0.54795,"width":0.705501,"height":0.278729}},{"text":"Association of Boston Masters (1845)","bbox":{"left":0.147042,"top":0.838412,"width":0.291168,"height":0.017317000000000027}},{"text":". . . These soft and silken reformers who wish to smooth the passes to knowledge, and \n make a world for the young which God has never made, would only spoil the rising generation,","bbox":{"left":0.147042,"top":0.86745,"width":0.683156,"height":0.031828999999999996}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}