William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 2

[343] the two classes, natives and foreigners, are nearly equal in ignorance, there being twenty-two thousand natives to thirty thousand foreigners who cannot sign their names. One of the New Haven inspectors says that forty-one children in a hundred fail to attend school; so that nearly half the people in that noble city--one of the leading lights of civilization-are growing up in the moral darkness of Nigerines and Kickapoos. Texas has tried the compulsory system; but, having failed to get her lads and lasses into school by force, has gone back to her old plan of letting everybody do as he likes.

No other State or Territory in the Union cares to try a scheme of public teaching which requires the vigour of New England teachers and superintendents to conduct, and which three of the six New England States have either never adopted or have set aside. Some States require certificates of training, to be produced by parents and guardians, but these testimonials of proficiency are said to be hardly worth a straw. Americans who know their country as I know my house and garden tell me that the young generation of Americans are growing up more ignorant than their fathers thirty years ago.