THIS is the title of a semi-monthly publication, expressly designed to advance the education of the people. The editor is the Hon. Horace Mann, a name associated with public spirit, and with the wisdom and ability which achieve great ends by direct and judicious means. The importance of Mr. Mann's enterprise should dispose every enlightened person in the community to aid it, and to make generally available the publication, which is an essential organ of his opinions and his counsel. The Common School Journal was announced last year, and the first number appeared November, 1838. It is issued by Marsh, Capen, and Lyon, 133 Washington Street, Boston.

The following prospectus of this Journal, was prefixed to the first number:

"The great object of the work will be the improvement of COMMON SCHOOLS, and other means of Popular Education. It is also intended to make it a depository of the Laws of the Commonwealth in relation to Schools, and of the Reports, Proceedings, &c., of the Massachusetts BOARD OF EDUCATION. As the documents of that Board will have a general interest, they ought to be widely diffused, and permanently preserved.

"The Paper will explain, and, as far as possible, enforce upon all parents, guardians, teachers, and school-officers, their respective duties towards the rising generation. It will also address to children and youth all intelligible motives to obey the laws of physical health, to cultivate "good behavior," to strengthen the intellectual faculties, and enrich them with knowledge; and to advance moral and religious sentiments into ascendency and control over animal and selfish propensities.

"The Paper will be kept aloof from partisanship in politics, and sectarianism in religion; vindicating, and commending to practice, only the great and fundamental truths of civil and social obligation, of moral and religious duty.

"It will not be so much the object of the work to discover, as to diffuse knowledge. In this age and country, the difficulty is not so much that but few things on the subject of education are known, as it is that but few persons know them. Many parents and teachers, not at all deficient in good sense, and abounding in good feelings and good purposes, fail only from want of in

formation how to expand and cherish the infantile and juvenile mind; and hence they ruin children through love unguided by wisdom. It should therefore be the first effort of all friends of education to make that which is now known to any, as far as possible, known to all. The proposed Paper is designed to be the instrument of accomplishing such an object."

It would not be easy to devise a more rational and useful project than that indicated above, and nearly a year has demonstrated a fulfilment commensurate to the importance of the design. To explain and enforce the value of the common schools of this country, is the chief part of this design, which is illustrated in the first number of the Journal, by a stirring and eloquent appeal to the reader:

"What rank are common schools entitled to hold in our private and legislative regards? After an experiment of almost two hundred years, what is the verdict rendered by Time on their utility and necessity? Is the homage we are wont to pay them traditionary merely, or is it founded upon an intelligent conviction, and an actual realization of their benefits? Have they scattered good among past generations, and have they averted evil? Go back to the earliest days of the colony, to the year 1647, when they had their origin, - when almost the whole of the present territory of this state was a wilderness; strike out of existence this single element- the provision made for the education of the whole people and would our recorded history be different from what it is? Would it have been illuminated or darkened by the change? Without the schools, should we have had the great men in the councils, and in the fields of the Revolution? or, which is substantially the same ques tion, should we have had the mothers of those men? Should we have had the sages who formed our own state Constitution, and assisted in that more arduous work, the formation of the Constitution of the United States? Without the schools, should we have had the industrious yeomanry, exhibiting so generally within our limits the cheering signs of comfort, competence, and respectability; or that race of artisans and inventors, who have made partnership with the inexhaustible powers of the material world, and won their resistless forces to labor for human amelioration? Without the schools, would the same qualities of intelligence and virtue have signalized the hundreds of thousands who, from the distant regions of the West and South, turn their eyes hitherward to their ancestral home? Would our enter. prise equally have circuited the globe, and brought back whatVOL. XXVII. 3D S. VOL. IX. NO. III.

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ever products belong to a milder climate or a richer soil? Without this simple and humble institution, would no change have come over our character abroad, our social privileges at home, over the laws which sustain, the charities which bless, the morals which preserve, the religion which sanctifies?"

The answer, which experience and the natural heart, penetrated with gratitude for social benefits, make to these questions, ought at once to press upon the public conscience the duty to preserve without deterioration, and to exalt to their highest improvement the schools which have been the source of so much good. As matter of "private regard," this duty is especially binding upon those who enjoy other opportunities of education, than the common school affords.

If society could be formed into two great classes, the highly cultivated, and those completely untaught of all learning all recorded wisdom- by what reflected influences would these classes be made to honor and serve one another? Nothing but antipathy, jealousy, and contempt, would characterize the common mind, alienated in its parts by wide disparity of intelligence. The scholars, speaking with the tongues of men and angels, and understanding all mysteries and all knowledge open to the human intellect, would be nothing, being destitute of that charity, which is not only love, but justice; and unlearned men, deprived of instruction, would hate both knowledge and its professors, and, despising the revenue that is better than silver, would be given over to sordidness and mere animalism. The salutary authority of genius and wisdom in the world depends upon the preparation of mind, which enables the lessfavored to appreciate the better-endowed, in all manifestations of their superiority, and in their services to mankind. It is this moral and intelligent preparation, which inclines and enables the former to profit by the discoveries, inventions, and attainments, and moreover, by the counsels and guidance of the latter. The greatest and best men that live, or that have lived, indeed, such never die, -"they are essentially immortal,"

"Their spirits govern when their clay is cold,” –

are the benefactors of their fellow-men. But be they statesmen or philosophers, divines or poets, projectors or performers of great works, they must be honored before they can serve with effect. They will live in vain, till the value of their ser

vices can be in some sort appreciated by those they would benefit. The reflected talents and virtues of great and good men ennoble all other men, who, dwelling in their light, see light. But when other men have eyes and see not, and ears and hear not, it is because those eyes and ears have not been opened to truth and wisdom; and the mind and heart, through domination of the animal principle, have waxed gross, and have become impervious to that truth of which the higher mind is the organ. It is natural for men to desire to enlarge the limits of their own intellectual power. Now the culti

vated minds, who would do this, must labor to make others fit for the reception of those principles, which render virtue venerable, and truth beautiful in general estimation. Selfish motives, if more generous ones avail nothing, might incline the best instructed portion of society to do all in their power, for those who are suffering for lack of knowledge; for in the end, the instructed class, wanting the estimation of others, and encompassed by ignorance, will feel the effects of such proximity. None not the wisest and most virtuous of mankind, are superior to consequences, produced upon themselves by degraded or unfurnished minds everywhere surrounding them.

The best condition of society must be that in which each member respects himself; honors his vocation, whatever it may be; cultivates his moral and intellectual nature, as he has opportunity, ought not all to be afforded opportunity? and looks upon his fellow man of every condition, as his brother,the member of a universal family under the government of one Father, and supreme Legislator. Nothing can produce such a result, but institutions for the common good, devised and sustained by the most influential class of the community. This class must in all countries be that to which leisure and knowledge afford the means of knowing what best may promote the welfare of the whole. "The intention of general education is to form the many and not the few. If the many are ignorant, in vain shall we assert that the few are wise." Certain professions, the use of property, and the dignity of known talent, give men and women ascendency in society, and enable them to countenance what is useful, to cherish what is good, and to disseminate what is true, and gradually to meliorate, by so doing, the minds, the manners, and the misery of mankind.

Nothing in human affairs is so fixed and established, that it needs neither foresight nor vigilance to preserve it. Every

human institution must be sustained in efficacy by the intervention, calculation, and care of intelligence. Institutions for the promotion of knowledge are to be sustained only by extensive enlightenment of the public mind. Good foundations may be laid, but the superstructure will decay, if it be not repaired, extended, and adorned, according to new and enlarged wants of social man. The school is especially designed to aid natural ignorance, to assist parental inability, to cherish the social spirit, and to operate in accord with self-culture. It ought to lay foundations of character, to instil sound principles of morality, and to implant those rudiments of thought, taste, and action, that, germinating in the field of the world, may produce the richest harvest of virtue and happiness. How to make the school the instrument to such an end is a grand science. It is easy to say that it ought to operate to such a result, and that it may be made to do so;-but how shall this result be brought about?

The best method and instruments of a wise public instruction can only be perfectly ascertained by a long course of experiment and exposition. Men must know what they have, what they need, and what is to be sought for, and may be obtained, before the most perfect economy of education can be produced and exhibited. It is of small account, that only a few persons read, and write, and publish what has been done by some philanthropist among ourselves, or what is practised in some distant country to improve education. Those who superintend the schools, those who pay for them, those who teach in them, and those who may be particularly served or injured by them, in the improvement, or depravation of their children, require information of what schools may do, and of what they fail to do. Catherine the Second thought to commence a system of education for her poor, brutified subjects; and in 1764, she convened a diet of the empire, to devise one: but the Russian nobles were too ignorant to conceive what she aimed at, and consequently were wholly in the dark concerning the means to be employed to effect her project. Their deliberations, of course, ended in nothing. Ignorance like this does not exist among us, but ignorance approximating to it obtains everywhere, when the leading minds of the community, or those which ought to be the leading minds, merely complain of general ignorance, and speculate upon the decay of learning, or the advancement of it, without actual knowledge