English Life, Social and Domestic, in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century; Considered in Reference to Our Position as a Community of Professing Christians (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1851. Excerpt: ... Chapter III. EDUCATIONAL INFLUENCES OF THE AGE. Section 1.--General Hemabks. TF the culture and intelligence of the age we.-live in, and above all, the more general recognition of the duties and ordinances of Christianity have produced a decided improvement in our social and domestic relations, we may expect that they will have exerted a no less beneficial effect on educational influences. By educational influences I mean, the influence which legislators, parents, guardians, and teachers possess over the minds of the rising generation: --legislators, in their power of promoting, controlling, and directing public education; parents and guardians, as carrying on the same controlling and directing influence over private education, --or as it may happen, of entering personally into the work; and teachers, as acting out the views of legislators or parents, in their public or private, domestic or ex-domestic capacities. With the effects of legislative educational enactments, we have little to do in such an inquiry as this, both because it is limited, and because they relate chiefly to the training of the poorer classes of society. But the subject can scarcely be dismissed, without remarking that educational movements--beginning with the lowest classes, --form a distinctive feature of the age we live in, and, working upwards, have already begun to influence the whole mass of society. Over the improvement which has taken place in the state of public schools for the higher classes, both intellectually, morally, and in respect of religious instruction, during the last fourteen or fifteen years, there is also cause to rejoice; though he is gone to his early rest, who first attempted to infuse a higher tone of christian morality, and a more liberal system of instruction