, pp. 41, 42, 43.
BOUCHER ON AMERICAN EDUCATION IN 1773
"You pay far too little regard to parental education....
"What is still less credible is that at least two-thirds of the little
education we receive is derived from instructors who are either
indented servants or transported felons. Not a ship arrives either
with redemptioners or convicts, in which schoolmasters are not as
regularly advertised for sale as weavers, tailors, or any other trade;
with little other difference, that I can hear of, excepting perhaps
that the former do not usually fetch so good a price as the latter....
"I own, however, that I dislike slavery and among other reasons
because as it is here conducted it has pernicious effects on the
social state, by being unfavorable to education. It certainly is no
necessary circumstance, essential to the condition of a slave, that he
be uneducated; yet this is the general and almost universal lot of the
slaves. Such extreme, deliberate, and systematic inattention to all
mental improvement, in so large portion of our species, gives far too
much countenance and encouragement to those abject persons who are
contented to be rude and ignorant.
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