What is the purpose of primary intellectual education? I apprehend
that its first object is to train the young in the use of those tools
wherewith men extract knowledge from the ever-shifting; succession of
phenomena which pass before their eyes; and that its second object is to
inform them of the fundamental laws which have been found by experience
to govern the course of things, so that they may not be turned out
into the world naked, defenceless, and a prey to the events they might
control.
A boy is taught to read his own and other languages, in order that he
may have access to infinitely wider stores of knowledge than could ever
be opened to him by oral intercourse with his fellow men; he learns to
write, that his means of communication with the rest of mankind may be
indefinitely enlarged, and that he may record and store up the knowledge
he acquires. He is taught elementary mathematics, that he may understand
all those relations of number and form, upon which the transactions of
men, associated in complicated societies, are built, and that he may
have some practice in deductive reasoning.
All these operations of reading, writing, and ciphering are intellectual
tools, whose use should, before all things, be learned, and learned
thoroughly; so that the youth may be enabled to make his life that which
it ought to be, a continual progress in learning and in wisdom.