7718. SCHOOLS, European.—[continued].
Let us view the disadvantages
of sending a youth to Europe. To enumerate them all would require a volume. I
will select a few. If he goes to England, he
learns drinking, horse racing and boxing.
These are the peculiarities of English education.
The following circumstances are common
to education in that and the other countries
of Europe. He acquires a fondness for
European luxury and dissipation, and a contempt
for the simplicity of his own country;
he is fascinated with the privileges of the European
aristocrats, and sees, with abhorrence,
the lovely equality which the poor enjoy with
the rich in his own country; he contracts a
partiality for aristocracy or monarchy; he
forms foreign friendships which will never be
useful to him, and loses the seasons of life
for forming, in his own country, those friendships
which, of all others, are the most faithful
and permanent; * * * and * * * he
returns to his own country unacquainted with
the practices of domestic economy, necessary
to preserve him from ruin, speaking and writing
his native tongue as a foreigner, and, therefore,
unqualified to obtain those distinctions,
which eloquence of the pen and tongue ensures
in a free country; for I would observe to you,
that what is called style in writing or speaking,
is formed very early in life, while the imagination
is warm, and impressions are permanent.—
To J. Bannister. Washington ed. i, 467.
(P.
1785)
