During these seven years it continues, and ten months are devoted to it each year.

The school takes and keeps the child three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon; it pours into these little heads all that is possible in such a length of time, all that they can hold and more too,--spelling, syntax, grammatical and logical analysis, rules of composition and of style, history, geography, arithmetic, geometry, drawing, notions of literature, politics, law, and finally a complete moral system, "civic morality." It is obviously very useful for every adult to be able to read, write and reckon.

Who, then, can criticize a Government because it insists that all children be taught these basic skills?
But for the same reason and on the same principle, provision could be made for swimming-schools in every village and town on the sea-coast, or on the streams and rivers; every boy should be obliged to learn how to swim .-- That it may be useful for every boy and girl in the United States to pass through the entire system of primary instruction is peculiar to the United States and is comprehensible in an extensive and new country where multiplied and diverse pursuits present themselves on all sides;[6395] where every career may lead to the highest pinnacle; where a rail-splitter may become president of the republic; where the adult often changes his career and, to afford him the means for improvising a competency at each change, he must possess the elements of every kind of knowledge; where the wife, being for the man an object of luxury, does not use her arms in the fields and scarcely ever uses her hands in the household.[6396]--It is not the same in France.

Nine out of ten pupils in the primary school are sons or daughters of peasants or of workmen and will remain in the condition of their parents; the girl, adult, will do washing and cooking all her life at home or abroad; the son, adult, confined to his occupation will work all his life in a shop or on his own or another's field.

Between this destiny of the adult and the plenitude of his primary instruction, the disproportion is enormous; it is evident that his education does not prepare him for the life he has to lead; but for another life, less monotonous, under less restraint, more cerebral, and of which a faint glimpse disgusts him with his own;[6397] at least, it will disgust him for a long time and frequently, until the day comes when his school acquisitions, wholly superficial, shall have evaporated in contact with the ambient atmosphere and no longer appear to him other than empty phrases; in France, for an ordinary peasant or workman, so much the better if this day comes early.[6398] At the very least, three quarters of these acquisitions are for him superfluous.