William Cowper, friend of John Newton, the great hymn writer and poet was against age segregation and the rise of public schools. He wrote a VERY long poem in 1784 called, Tirocinium: A Review of Schools. Here he declares himself against public age segregated education. In the poem he identifies the foolishness of the kind of education that contradicts the Bible.
Here are some excerpts to give you a general feel for his message,
And, common sense diffusing real day,
The meteor of the gospel dies away. Such rhapsodies our shrewd discerning youth
Learn from expert inquirers after truth;
Whose only care, might truth presume to speak,
Is not to find what they profess to seek.
And thus, well tutored only while we share
A mother’s lectures and a nurse’s care;
And taught at schools much mythologic stuff
But sound religion sparingly enough
Our early notices of truth, disgraced,
Soon lose their credit, and are all effaced.
Would you your son should be a sot or dunce,
Lascivious, headstrong, or all these at once;
That in good time the stripling’s finished taste
For loose expense, and fashionable waste,
Should prove your ruin, and his own at last;
Train him in public with a mob of boys,
Childish in mischief only and in noise,
Else of a manish growth, and five in ten
In infidelity and lewdness men.
There shall he learn, ere sixteen winters old,
Tha authors are most usful pawned or sold;
That pedantry is all that schools impart,
But taverns teach the knowledge of the hart,
There waiter Dick, with Bacchanalian lays,
Shall win his heart, and have his drunken praise,
His counsellor and bosom friend shall prove,
And some street-pacing harlot his first love.
Schools, unless discipline were doubly strong,
Detain their adolescent charge too long;
The management of tyros of eighteen
Is difficult; their punishment obscene….
For public schools tis public folly feeds.
The slaves of custom and established mode,
With packhorse constancy we keep the road,
Cooked or straigh, through quags or thorny dells,
True to the jingling of our leader’s bells.
To follow foolish precedent, and wind
With both our eyes, is easier than to think;…
That youth takes pleasure in, to please his boy;
Then why why resign into a stranger’s hand
A task as much withing your own command,
That God and nature, and your interest too,
Seem with one voice to delegate to you?
We hire a lodging in a house unknown
For one whose tenderest thoughts all hover round your own?
Alas poor boy! – the natural effect
Of love by absence chilled into respect,
Say, what accomplishments, at school acquired,
Brings he, to sweeten fruits so undesired?
Thou well deserv’st an alienated son,
Unless thy conscious heart acknowledge – none;
None that, in thy domestic snug recess,
He has not made his own with more address,
Though some, perhaps, that shock thy feeling mind,
And better never learned, or left behind….”
And seems it nothing in a father’s eye,
That unimproved those many moments fly?
And is he will content his son should find
No nourishment to feed his growing mind
But conjugated verbs, and nouns declined?
For such is all the mental food purveyed
By public hackneys in the schooling trade;
Who feed a pupil’s intellect with store
Of Syntax. Truly, but with little more;
Dismiss themselves when they dismiss their flock,
Machines themselves, and governed by a clock.
To form thy son, to strike his genius forth;
Beneath thy roof, beneath thine eye, to prove
The force of discipline, when backed by love;
To double all thy pleasure in thy child,
His mind informed, his morals undefiled.
Safe under such a wing, the boy shall show
No spots contracted among grooms blow,
Nor taint his speech with meannesses, designed
By footman Tom for witty and refined.
There, in his commerce with the liv’ried herd,
Lurks the contagion chiefly to be feared”
Pull down the schools – what! – all the schools in the land;
Or throw them up to livery-nags and grooms,
Or turn them into shops and auction rooms.
