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This method of ventilation and warming, original in much of its details, and the result of much study and experiment, has since been extensively introduced into the public buildings of the State, being recommended by its superior conduciveness to health, comfort, and security from fire, as well as by considerations of economy and convenience. Every room is lighted by gas manufactured on the premises, and supplied with filtered rain water from a hydrant in each. In addition to other accommodations, this building contains eight bathing rooms for warm, cold, and shower baths.

The course of instruction embraces two stages,-one preparatory of two years, the other collegiate of four years. For admission to the collegiate course, the pupil must be of the age of fourteen years, and be qualified to pursue with advantage the studies of the course. These are, in Science, during the first year, Robinson's University Algebra, Wilson's Universal History, and Wood's Class-Book of Botany; the second year, Geometry and Trigonometry, Plane and Spherical (Davies' Legendre,) Natural Philosophy and Chemistry, with Experimental Lectures, and Descriptive Astronomy; the third year, Physical Astronomy, (Robinson's University,) Geology (Hitchcock's,) Hooker's Higher Physiology, Guizot's Earth and Man; Paley's Natural Theology, and Alexander's Evidences of Christianity; in the fourth year, Haven's Mental Philosophy, or Bowen's Hamilton's Metaphysics, Hamilton's Logic, Hickok's or Haven's Moral Science, Day's Rhetoric, Guizot's History of Civilization, and Day's Book-keeping. A course of Latin is required in addition, in order to graduation, as well as a thorough training in elocution, and English Composition. The study of English Literature in its history and peculiarities is pursued chiefly by oral instruction and systematic exercises in connection with the use of Day's Rhetorical Praxis, and Cleveland's Compendium. The Greek, and also the Modern European Languages are optional studies. Drawing and Painting are also optional; and Vocal and Instrumental Music. In these optional branches, the desire is to provide the most complete and thorough instruction; so that there shall be furnished within the walls of the Institution the highest order of instructors and the most ample facilities for culture in all the departments of Science, Literature, and in the Arts of Painting and Music.

In Physical Culture, the system of exercise, improved and adapted to American Educational wants, by Dr. Dio Lewis, is in successful use in the college.

The religious character of the Institution is Evangelical Christian

without Denominationalism. The pupils worship Sunday morning in the neighboring church, and in the evening in the college.

The literary distinctions awarded by the Institution are the Baccalaureate Degree on the completion of the regular collegiate course of study; and the Crown-Laureate on the completion of a two years' graduate course.

The history of the college shows it to have been eminently successful. The attendance in the aggregate has averaged over one hundred and fifty each year; and the number of pupils, in actual attendance has increased for the last five or six years, since the erection of the new building in a very uniform ratio of about twenty per cent. a year. The fact, in this increase of actual attendance, of greatest significance is this; that it is owing chiefly to the increase of the average period of attendance on the part of the pupils respectively. In correspondence with this, there has been a steadily and rapidly rising standard of attainment and discipline. Although a truly liberal education for either sex must be confined to the comparatively few yet the diffusion through these few of a perfect culture penetrates the masses of society with an elevating, refining power that can not well be over-estimated.

The first graduates of the College were of the class of 1851,two in number; in the class of 1862, there were seventeen. The whole number of graduates to 1862, inclusive, is ninety-five, of whom three are, now-May, 1863, deceased.

The whole number of pupils in attendance during the collegiate year ending June 11th, 1863, is two hundred and one, of whom, one hundred and fifty-nine were boarders in the Institution. They were from Ohio, 126; from Indiana, 41; from Kentucky, 15; from Tennessee; 6; Virginia, 4; California, 2; Illinois, 2; from Iowa, New York, Alabama, Washington City, South America, each, one.

The Faculty of Instruction for the year ending June, 1863, consists of the President, Rev. HENRY N. DAY, D. D., LL. D., and Miss MARGARET H. WALLACE, Principal, assisted by twenty associated professors, lecturers, and instructors, of whom four are gentlemen and sixteen ladies.

The period of Instruction each year, including a winter recess of about two weeks, during the Christmas and New Year's holidays, is forty weeks, beginning on the first Monday of September, and ending with the Annual Commencement on the second Thursday of June.

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ON SPECIAL PREPARATION, A PREREQUISITE TO TEACHING, 1838.

BY HORACE MANN,

Gentlemen of the Convention:

AFTER the lapse of another year, we are again assembled to hold counsel together for the welfare of our children. On this occasion we have much reason to meet each other with voices of congratulation and hearts of gladness. During the past year the cause of Popular Education in this Commonwealth has gained some suffrages of public opinion. On presenting its wants and its claims to citizens in every part of the State, I have found that there were many individuals who appreciated its importance, and who only awaited an opportunity to give utterance and action to their feelings;-in almost every town, some,-in many, a band.

Some of our hopes, also, have become facts. The last Legislature acted toward this cause the part of a wise and faithful guardian. Inquiries having been sent into all parts of the Commonwealth to ascertain the deficiencies in our Common-School system, and the causes of failure in its workings; and the results of those inquiries having been communicated to the Legislature,-together with suggestions for the application of a few obvious and energetic remedies,—that body forthwith enacted such laws as the wants of the system most immediately and imperiously demanded. Probably at no session since the origin of our Common-School system have laws more propitious to its welfare been made, than during the last.

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But among all the auspicious events of the past year, ought not the friends of Popular Education to be most grateful, on account of the offer made by a private gentlemant to the Legislature, of the sum of ten thousand dollars, upon the conditions that the State should add thereto an equal sum, and that the amount should be expended, under the direction of the Board of Education, in qualifying teachers for our Common Schools, and of the promptness and unanimity with which the Legislature acceded to the proposition? I say, the unanimity, for the vote was entirely unanimous in the House of Representatives, and there was but one nay in the Senate. Vast donations have been made in this Commonwealth, both by the government and by individuals, for the cause of learning in some of its higher, and, of course, more limited departments; but I believe this to be the first instance where any considerable sum has been given for the cause of education, generally, and irrespective of class, or sect, or party. Munificent donations have frequently been made, among ourselves, as well as in other States and countries, to perpetuate some distinctive theory or dogma of one's own, or to requite a peculiar few who may have honored or flattered the giver. But this was given to augment the common mass of intelligence, and to promote universal culture; it was given with a high and enlightened disregard of all local, party, personal, or sectional views; it was given for the direct benefit of all the heart and all the mind, extant, or to be extant, in our beloved Commonwealth; and, in this respect, it certainly stands out almost, if not absolutely alone, both in the amount of the donation, and in the elevation of the motive that prompted it. I will not tarnish the brightness of this deed by attempting to gild it with praise.

*Copied, by permission, from Lectures on Education by Horace Mann, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. Boston: William B. Fowle. 1845. Most of the Lectures embraced in this volume were delivered by Mr. Mann before conventions of the friends of education, held in the several counties of Massachusetts in the autumn of each year, from 1833 to 1842. The lecture which follows was delivered in 1838, to prepare the public mind for a fair trial of the experiment of providing means for the special qualification of teachers for the common schools of the State.

+ Hon. Edmund Dwight, of Boston.

One of the truest and most impressive sentences ever uttered by Sir Walter Scott is, however, so appropriate, and forces itself so strongly upon my mind, that I cannot repress its utterance. When that plain and homely Scotch girl, Jeannie Deans, the highest of all the characters ever conceived by that gifted author,is pleading her suit before the British queen, and showing herself therein to be ten times a queen,-she utters the sentiment I refer to: "But when," says she, "the hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the body, and when the hour of death comes, that comes to high and low, then it isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly."

There is, then, at last, on the part of the government of Massachusetts, a recognition of the expediency of providing means for the special qualification of teachers for our Common Schools; or, at least, of submitting that question to a fair experiment. Let us not, however, deceive or flatter ourselves with the belief, that such an opinion very generally prevails, or is very deeply seated. A few, and those, as we believe, best qualified to judge, hold this opinion as an axiom. But this cannot be said of great numbers; and it requires no prophetic vision to foresee that any plan for carrying out this object, however wisely framed, will have to encounter not only the prejudices of the ignorant, but the hostility of the selfish.

The most momentous practical questions now before our State and country are these: In order to preserve our republican institutions, must not our Common Schools be elevated in character and increased in efficiency? and, in order to bring our schools up to the point of excellence demanded by the nature of our institutions, must there not be a special course of study and training to qualify teachers for their office? No other worldly interest presents any question comparable to these in importance. To the more special consideration of the latter, -namely, whether the teachers of our public schools require a special course of study and training to qualify them for their vocation,-Î solicit your attention, during the residue of this address.

I shall not here insist upon any particular mode of preparation, or of preparation in any particular class of institutions,—whether Normal Schools, special departments in academies, colleges, or elsewhere,-to the exclusion of all other institutions. What I insist upon, is, not the form, but the substance.

In treating this subject, duty will require me to speak of errors and deficiencies; and of the inadequate conceptions now entertained of the true office and mission of a teacher. This is a painful obligation, and in discharging it I am sure I shall not be misunderstood by any candid and intelligent mind. Toward the teachers of our schools,- -as a class,-I certainly possess none but the most fraternal feelings. Their want of adequate qualifications is the want of the times, rather than of themselves. Teachers, heretofore, have only been partakers in a general error,—an error in which you and I, my hearers, have been as profoundly lost as they. Let this be their excuse hitherto, and let the ignorance of the past be winked at; but the best service we can now render them, is to take this excuse away, by showing the inadequacy and the unsoundness of our former views. Let all who shall henceforth strive to do better, stand acquitted for past delinquencies; but will not those deserve a double measure of condemnation who shall set themselves in array against measures, which so many wise and good men have approved, at least until those measures have been fairly tested? When the tree shall have been planted long enough to mature its fruit, then, let it be known by its fruit.

No one has ever supposed that an individual could build up a material temple, and give it strength, and convenience, and fair proportions, without first mastering the architectural art; but we have employed thousands of teachers for our children, to build up the immortal Temple of the Spirit, who have never given to this divine, educational art, a day nor an hour of preliminary study or attention. How often have we sneered at Dogberry in the play, because he holds that "to read and write comes by nature;" when we ourselves have undertaken to teach, or have employed teachers, whose only fitness for giving instruction, not only in reading and writing, but in all other things, has come by nature, if it has come at all; that is, in exact accordance with Dogberry's philosophy.

In maintaining the affirmative of this question,-namely, that all teachers do require a special course of study and training, to qualify them for their profes

sion,-I will not higgle with my adversary in adjusting preliminaries. He may be the disciple of any school in metaphysics, and he may hold what faith he pleases, respecting the mind's nature and essence. Be he spiritualist or materialist, it here matters not,-nay, though he should deny that there is any such substance as mind or spirit at all, I will not stop to dispute that point with him, -preferring rather to imitate the example of those old knights of the tournament, who felt such confidence in the justness of their cause, that they gave their adversaries the advantage of sun and wind. For, whatever the mind may be, in its inscrutable nature or essence, or whether there be any such thing as mind or spirit at all, properly so called, this we have seen and do know, that there come beings into this world, with every incoming generation of children, who, although at first so ignorant, helpless, speechless,—so incapable of all motion, upright or rotary,-that we can hardly persuade ourselves they have not lost their way, and come, by mistake, into the wrong world; yet, after a few swift years have passed away, we see thousands of these same ignorant and helpless beings, expiating horrible offenses in prison-cells, or dashing themselves to death against the bars of a maniac's cage; others of them, we see, holding "colloquy sublime," in halls where a nation's fate is arbitrated, or solving some of the mightiest problems that belong to this wonderful universe; and others still, there are, who, by daily and nightly contemplation of the laws of God, have kindled that fire of divine truth within their bosoms, by which they become those moral luminaries whose light shineth from one part of the heavens unto the other. And this amazing change in these feeble and helpless creatures,-this transfiguration of them for good or for evil,-is wrought by laws of organization and of increase, as certain in their operation, and as infallible in their results, as those by which the skillful gardener substitutes flowers, and delicious fruits, and healing herbs, for briers, and thorns, and poisonous plants. And as we hold the gardener responsible for the productions of his garden, so is the community responsible for the general character and conduct of its children.

Some, indeed, maintain,-erroneously as we believe,-that a difference in education is the sole cause of all the differences existing among men. They hold that all persons come into the world just alike in disposition and capacity, though they go through it and out of it so amazingly diverse. They hold, in short, that if any two men had changed cradles, they would have changed characters and epitaphs;-that, not only does the same quantity of substance or essence go to the constitution of every human mind, but that all minds are of the same quality also,-all having the same powers, and bearing, originally, the same image and superscription, like so many half-dollars struck at the government mint.

But deeply as education goes into the core of the heart and the marrow of the bones, we do not claim for it any such prerogative. There are certain substructures of temperament and disposition, which education finds, at the beginning of its work, and which it can never wholly annul. Nor does it comport with the endless variety and beauty manifested in all other parts of the Creator's works, to suppose that he made all ears and eyes to be delighted with the same tunes and colors; or provided so good an excuse for plagiarism, as that all minds were made to think the same thoughts. This inherent and original diversity, however, only increases the difficulty of education, and gives additional force to the argument for previous preparation; for, were it true that all children are born just alike, in disposition and capacity, the only labor would be to discover the right method for educating a single child, and to stereotype it for all the rest. This, however, we must concede to those who affirm the original equality and exact similitude of all minds;-namely, that all minds have the same elementary or constituent faculties. This is all that we mean when we say that human nature is every where the same. This is, in part, what the Scriptures mean when they say, "God hath made of one blood all nations of men." The contrasts among men result, not from the possession of a different number of original faculties, but from possessing the same faculties, in different proportions, and in different degrees of activity. The civilized men of the present day, have neither more nor less faculties, in number, than their barbarian ancestors had. If so, it would be interesting to ascertain about what year, or century, a new good faculty was given to the race, or an old bad one was taken away. An assembly of civilized men, on this side of the globe, convening to devise measures for dimin

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