Excerpt from Reformatory Education, Vol. 2: Papers on Preventive, Correctional and Reformatory Institutions and Agencies in Different Countries From our earliest connection with the administration and improvement of Public Schools in the States of Connecticut and Rhode Island, we have been convinced of the necessity of establishing and employing special institutions and agencies, of various kinds, to meet the educational deficiencies, and counteract the causes and tendencies to vice and crime among a large and increasing class of the population in cities and manufacturing villages. In a report to the Legislature of Rhode Island in 1845, the following suggestions were made in reference to the Supplementary Schools and Agencies required in the cities and large villages of that State "for the children of reckless, vicious, and intemperate parents, whose natures have become so debased that they are willing to abandon their offspring to the chance education of the streets, or the demoralizing training of their own criminal and vicious practices," as well as for individuals whose school attendance has been prematurely abridged, or from any cause interfered with. "Evening Schools should be opened for apprentices, clerks, and other young persons, who have been hurried into active employment without a suitable elementary education. In these schools, those who have completed the ordinary course of school instruction, can devote themselves to such studies as are directly connected with their several trades or pursuits, while those whose early education was entirely neglected, can supply, to some extent, such deficiencies. It is not beyond the legitimate scope of a system of public instruction, to provide for the instruction of adults, who? from any cause, in early life were deprived of the advantages of school attendance. Libraries, and courses of familiar lectures, with practical illustrations, collections in natural history, and the natural sciences, a system of scientific exchanges between schools of the same, and of different towns, - these and other means of extending and improving the ordinary instruction of the school-room and of early life, ought to be provided, not only by individual enterprise and liberality, but by the public, and the authorities entrusted with the care and advancement of popular education. One or more of that class of educational institutions known as "Reform Schools," "Schools of Industry," or "Schools for Juvenile Offenders," should receive such children, as defying the restraining influence of parental authority, and the discipline and regulations of the public schools, or such as are abandoned by orphanage, or worse than orphanage, by parental neglect or example, to idle, vicious and pilfering habits, are found hanging about places of public resort, polluting the atmosphere by their profane and vulgar speech, alluring, to their own bad practices, children of the same, and other conditions of life, and originating or participating in every street brawl and low-bred riot. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.