initial commit of ebook 29630HEADmain

1 files changed, 4226 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/29630.txt b/29630.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..489c3a3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/29630.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4226 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Curse of Education, by Harold E. Gorst
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Curse of Education
+
+Author: Harold E. Gorst
+
+Release Date: August 7, 2009 [EBook #29630]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CURSE OF EDUCATION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow, Susan Skinner and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CURSE OF EDUCATION
+
+
+
+
+=Publisher's Announcement=
+
+A NOTABLE BOOK
+
+
+DRIFTING
+
+
+Crown 8vo., cloth, 2s. 6d.
+
+THIRD EDITION
+
+'An able and suggestive book.'--_The Spectator._
+
+'It is a sane, healthy indication of the weak spots in the country's
+armour, and a practical attempt to indicate remedies.'--_The Sunday
+Special._
+
+'The author's contempt for the time-serving politician, who in this
+country has, unfortunately, come to count for so much in all
+governments--Tory or Liberal--will be shared by the thinking portion of
+his fellow countrymen.'--_The Financial News._
+
+'By such suggestions the author of "Drifting" does good service to the
+country.'--_The Outlook._
+
+LONDON: GRANT RICHARDS
+9, Henrietta Street, W.C.
+
+
+
+
+The
+Curse of Education
+
+BY
+HAROLD E. GORST
+
+London
+Grant Richards
+1901
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+
+In calling this little book 'The Curse of Education,' I trust that I
+shall not be misunderstood to disparage culture. The term 'education' is
+used, for want of a better word, to express the conventional mode of
+teaching and bringing up children, and of educating youth in this and
+other civilized countries. It is with education systems, with the
+universal method of cramming the mind with facts, and particularly with
+the manufacture of uniformity and mediocrity by subjecting every
+individual to a common process, regardless of his natural bent, that I
+have chiefly to find fault. At a moment when the country is agitated
+with questions of educational reform, I thought it might be useful to
+draw attention to what I believe to be a fact, namely, that the
+foundations of all existing education systems are absolutely false in
+principle; and that teaching itself, as opposed to natural development
+and self-culture, is the greatest obstacle to human progress that social
+evolution has ever had to encounter.
+
+HAROLD E. GORST.
+
+LONDON,
+  _April, 1901._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                             PAGE
+
+   I. FLOURISHING MEDIOCRITY                                           1
+
+  II. SQUARE PEGS IN ROUND HOLES                                       8
+
+ III. THE DESTRUCTION OF GENIUS                                       18
+
+  IV. HUMAN FACTORIES                                                 26
+
+   V. THE GREATEST MISERY OF THE GREATEST NUMBER                      35
+
+  VI. THE OUTPUT OF PRIGS                                             44
+
+ VII. BOY DEGENERATION                                                53
+
+VIII. THE STRUGGLE OF THE EDUCATED                                    62
+
+  IX. WOMAN'S EMPIRE OVER MAN                                         68
+
+   X. YOUTH AND CRIME                                                 77
+
+  XI. MENTAL BREAKDOWN                                                86
+
+ XII. EVIDENCE OF HISTORY                                             92
+
+XIII. THE APOTHEOSIS OF CRAM                                         109
+
+ XIV. THE GREAT FALLACY                                              118
+
+  XV. REAL EDUCATION                                                 126
+
+ XVI. THE OPEN DOOR TO INTELLIGENCE                                  135
+
+
+
+
+THE CURSE OF EDUCATION
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+FLOURISHING MEDIOCRITY
+
+
+Humanity is rapidly becoming less the outcome of a natural process of
+development, and more and more the product of an organized educational
+plan. The average educated man possesses no real individuality. He is
+simply a manufactured article bearing the stamp of the maker.
+
+Year by year this fact is becoming more emphasized. During the past
+century almost every civilized country applied itself feverishly to the
+invention of a national plan of education, with the result that the
+majority of mankind are compelled to swallow a uniform prescription of
+knowledge made up for them by the State. Now there is a great outcry
+that England is being left behind in this educational race. Other
+nations have got more exact systems. Where the British child is only
+stuffed with six pounds of facts, the German and French schools contrive
+to cram seven pounds into their pupils. Consequently, Germany and France
+are getting ahead of us, and unless we wish to be beaten in the
+international race, it is asserted that we must bring our own
+educational system up to the Continental standard.
+
+Before going more deeply into this vital question, it is just as well to
+consider what these education systems have really done for mankind.
+There is a proverb, as excellent as it is ancient, which says that the
+proof of the pudding is in the eating. No doubt learned theoretical
+treatises upon the scope and aim of educational methods are capital
+things in their way, but they tell us nothing of the effects of this
+systematic teaching and cramming upon the world at large. If we wish to
+ascertain them, we must turn to life itself, and judge by results.
+
+To begin with, the dearth of great men is so remarkable that it scarcely
+needs comment. People are constantly expressing the fear that the age of
+intellectual giants has passed away altogether. This is particularly
+obvious in political life. Since the days of Gladstone and Disraeli,
+Parliamentary debate has sunk to the most hopeless level of mediocrity.
+The traditions of men such as Pitt, Fox, Palmerston, Peel, and others,
+sound at the present day almost like ancient mythology. Yet the supposed
+benefits of education are not only now free to all, but have been
+compulsorily conferred upon most nations. Nevertheless, even Prussian
+pedagogues have never succeeded in producing another Bismarck; and
+France has ground away at her educational mill for generations with the
+result that the supply of Napoleons has distinctly diminished.
+
+Look at the methods by which our public service is recruited.
+
+Who are the men to whom the administration of all important departments
+of Government is entrusted, and how are they selected?
+
+They are simply individuals who have succeeded in obtaining most marks
+in public competitive examinations--that is to say, men whose brains
+have been more effectually stuffed with facts and mechanical knowledge
+than were the brains of their unsuccessful competitors.
+
+There is no question, when a candidate presents himself for a post in
+the Diplomatic Service or in one of the Government offices, whether he
+possesses tact, or administrative ability, or knowledge of the world.
+All that is demanded of him is that his mind should be crammed with so
+many pounds avoirdupois of Latin, Greek, mathematics, history,
+geography, etc., acquired in such a way that he will forget, within a
+couple of years, every fact that has been pestled into him. For every
+vacancy in the various departments of the Administration there are
+dozens, or even scores, of applicants; and the candidate selected for
+the post is the one whose mind has been most successfully subjected to
+this process of over-cramming, and consequently most effectually ruined
+for all the practical purposes of life.
+
+Now, to whatever cause it may be ascribed, there can be no doubt that
+the general level throughout the various branches of the public service
+is one of mediocrity. We are not surrounded, faithful and devoted as our
+public servants are universally admitted to be, by administrative
+geniuses. Facts point altogether the other way. Great national
+catastrophes, like the blunders and miscalculations that have
+characterized the conduct of the war in South Africa, have always
+resulted in making the most uncomfortable revelations concerning the
+inefficiency of more than one important department of Government.
+
+The War Office has long since become a public scandal, and if the truth
+were known about the inner domesticity of more than one great
+Administrative office, the susceptibilities of the nation would be still
+further shocked and outraged. Fortunately, however--or it may be
+unfortunately--Government linen is usually washed at home; and it is
+only in times of great emergency that the truth leaks out, to the
+general consternation.
+
+When this does happen there is a great outcry about the inefficiency of
+this or that branch of the public service. The Government in power wait
+to see if the agitation dies a natural death; and if it is successfully
+kept up, a sort of pretence at reform takes place. There is a
+re-shuffle. Fresh names are given to old abuses; incompetent officials
+exchange posts; and a new building is erected at the public expense.
+Then all goes on as heretofore.
+
+Nobody seems to think of making an inquiry into the constitution of the
+public service itself. But until this is done no real reform of any
+permanent value can possibly be effected. It is not the nomenclature of
+appointments, the subdivision of departmental work, and such matters of
+detail, that stand in need of the reformer. The titles and duties of the
+several officials are of secondary importance. It is not in them that
+the evils of bad administration are to be located.
+
+The fault lies with the officials themselves, who are the victims of the
+stupid system which has placed them in the position they occupy. The
+education they have received has, in the first case, unfitted them for
+the performance of any but mechanical and routine work; and the strain
+of a competitive examination, involving the most unintellectual and
+brain-paralyzing process of cram, has probably destroyed the faculty of
+initiative, which should be, but is not, a distinguishing characteristic
+of the administrative official.
+
+Herein lies the secret of all opposition to progress. It is the
+permanent official who needs reforming. He is the embodiment of routine
+and conservatism, because he is the embodiment of mediocrity. Progress
+means ideas, and mediocrity does not deal in them. It has been
+furnished, instead, by a systematic course of instruction, with a
+sufficient equipment of the ideas of other people to last its lifetime.
+Whilst we fill our public service with specially prepared mediocrity,
+the administrative departments will remain reactionary. And as long as
+education is synonymous with cramming on an organized plan, it will
+continue to produce mediocrity.
+
+The army affords at the present moment an admirable object-lesson in
+this connection. The results of cramming young men as a preparation for
+a profession which demands, more than any other, individual initiative
+and independence, have become painfully apparent upon the field of
+battle. One of our foremost generals has come home from the campaign
+declaring the necessity of both officers and men being trained to think
+and act for themselves. That is one, perhaps the chief, of the great
+lessons which this war has taught us. But here, again, no useful reform
+can be achieved by alterations in the drill-book, through lectures by
+experienced generals, or by the issue of army orders. It is our entire
+system of education which is again at fault.
+
+Boys are stuffed with facts before they go to Sandhurst, and when they
+get there they are crammed in special subjects. The whole object of the
+process is to enable candidates to pass examinations, and not to produce
+good officers. The effect here is the same as elsewhere. A quantity of
+useless and some useful knowledge is drilled into the pupil in such a
+manner that the mind retains nothing that has been put into it. And, to
+make matters worse, all this is done at the expense of retarding the
+proper development of faculties which would be of incalculable value to
+the soldier.
+
+Most of the blunders of the war are, in fact, attributable to want of
+common sense, and common sense consists in the capacity of an individual
+to think for himself and to exercise his judgment. Educational methods
+which, in the majority of cases, appear to destroy this faculty
+altogether are clearly pernicious. Common sense is the most valuable
+gift with which man can be endowed. It is the very essence of genius,
+for it consists in the application of intelligence to every detail, and
+the highest order of intellect can accomplish no more than that. Yet it
+is the rarest of all attributes, for the very reason that it is
+deliberately destroyed by conventional methods of bringing up children
+and instructing youth. Therefore, before we can hope to obtain a supply
+of self-reliant officers and men, we must see some radical change in the
+very principles upon which modern methods of education are founded.
+
+Wherever we go we find this curse of mediocrity. In the professions, at
+the Bar, in the pulpit, amongst physicians, it is apparent everywhere.
+There are clever men, of course; but the very fact that their names
+spring at once prominently to mind is in itself a proof that ability is
+exceptional.
+
+Some people, of course, accepting the world as they find it, may think
+it very unreasonable to expect able men to be plentiful in all walks of
+life. That is, to my mind, the chief pathos of the situation. It has
+come to be accepted that the world must be filled with a great majority
+of very commonplace people, even amongst the educated classes.
+
+No doubt it is filled at the present moment with a very vast
+preponderance of conventional minds manufactured to meet the supposed
+requirements of our complicated civilization. But I deny that this need
+be the case. On the contrary, we are surrounded on all sides by ability,
+by great possibilities of individual development, even by genius.
+
+And our education systems are busily engaged in the work of destroying
+this precious material, substituting facts for ideas, forcing the mind
+away from its natural bent, and manufacturing a machine instead of a
+man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+SQUARE PEGS IN ROUND HOLES
+
+
+Perhaps the worst evil from which the world suffers in an educational
+sense is the misplaced individual. Nothing is more tragic, and yet
+nothing is more common, than to see men occupying positions for which
+they are unfitted by nature and therefore by inclination; whilst it is
+obvious that, had the circumstances of their early training been
+different, they might have followed with success and pleasure a natural
+bent of mind tending in a wholly opposite direction.
+
+This miscarriage of vocation is one of the greatest causes of individual
+misery in this world that exists; but its pernicious effects go far
+beyond mere personal unhappiness: they exercise the most baneful
+influence upon society at large, upon the progress of nations, and upon
+the development of the human race. One of the advantages of the division
+of labour which is most emphasized by political economists is that it
+offers a fair field for personal adaptation. People select the
+particular employment for which they are most fitted, and in this way
+everybody in the community is engaged in doing the best and most useful
+work of which he is capable.
+
+It is a fine theory. Perhaps in olden times, before the introduction of
+education systems, it may have worked well in regard to most trades and
+industries. A man had then at least some opportunity of developing a
+natural bent. He was not taken by the State almost from infancy, crammed
+with useless knowledge, and totally unfitted for any employment within
+his reach. The object was not to educate him above his station and then
+make a clerk of him, or drive him into the lower branches of the Civil
+Service. A bright youth was apprenticed by his father to some trade for
+which he may have shown some predisposition.
+
+Of course, mistakes were often made through the stupidity of parents or
+from some other cause. There are many such examples to be met with in
+the biographies of men who attained eminence in wholly different
+callings from those into which they were forced in their youth.
+
+Sir William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, and who first conceived the
+generally-accepted theory as to the cause of sun-spots, was brought up
+by his father to be a musician. In spite of his predilection for
+astronomy, he continued to earn his bread by playing the oboe, until he
+was promoted from being a performer in the Pump Room at Bath to the
+position of Astronomer Royal.
+
+Faraday was apprenticed by his father to a bookbinder, and he remained
+in this distasteful employment until he was twenty-two. It was quite by
+accident that somebody more intelligent than Michael Faraday's pastors
+and masters discovered that the youth had a great natural love of
+studying science, and sent him to hear a course of lectures delivered
+by Sir Humphry Davy. This led happily to the young bookbinder making the
+acquaintance of the lecturer, and eventually obtaining a position as
+assistant in the Royal Institution.
+
+Linnaeus, the great naturalist, had a very narrow escape from missing his
+proper vocation. He was sent to a grammar-school, but exhibited no taste
+for books; therefore his father decided to apprentice him to a
+shoemaker. Fortunately, however, a discriminating physician had observed
+the boy's love of natural history, and took him into his own house to
+teach him botany and physiology.
+
+Instances of the kind might be multiplied. Milton himself began life as
+a schoolmaster, and the father of Turner, one of the greatest landscape
+painters who ever lived, did his best to turn his brilliant son into a
+barber. The point, however, is obvious enough without the need of
+further illustration. A few examples have been adduced of great geniuses
+who have contrived, by the accident of circumstances or through sheer
+force of character, to escape from an environment which was forced upon
+them against their natural inclination. But it is not everybody who is
+gifted with such commanding talent and so much obstinacy and
+perseverance as to be able to overcome the artificial obstacles placed
+in the way of his individual tendencies; and now we have, what happily
+did not exist in the day of Herschel, Faraday, Turner, Linnaeus and
+others--a compulsory education system to strangle originality and
+natural development at the earliest possible stage.
+
+Most people would probably find it far easier to quote instances offhand
+of friends who had missed their proper vocation in life than of those
+who were placed exactly in the position best suited to their taste and
+capacity. The failures in life are so obviously in excess of those who
+may be said to have succeeded that specific illustrations of the fact
+are hardly necessary.
+
+One has only to exert ordinary powers of observation to perceive that
+the world is not at all well ordered in this respect. It has already
+been pointed out that the public service and the professions are almost
+entirely filled with what must be called mediocrity; and one of the most
+potent causes of this unhappy state of affairs is the exquisite
+infallibility with which a blind system is constantly forcing square
+pegs into round holes.
+
+Every profession and calling teems with examples. There are men,
+intended by nature to be artists and musicians, leading a wretched and
+unnatural existence in many a merchant's office because their best
+faculties were undeveloped during the early years of schooling.
+Mathematicians, philosophers, even poets, are tied to trade or to some
+equally unsuitable occupation. Scores of so-called literary men ought to
+be calculating percentages or selling dry goods; and no doubt there are
+shop-assistants and stock-jobbers who might, if led into the path of
+culture, have become creditable authors and journalists.
+
+This is neither joke nor satire. It is sober earnest, as many observant
+readers will readily testify. The loss is not only to the individual, it
+is to society at large, and to the whole world. No one will deny the
+fact; but to how many will it occur that such anomalies cannot be the
+outcome of natural development and progress, but that they must be
+directly or indirectly attributable to some artificial cause?
+
+It is the great difficulty against which all human advancement has to
+contend, that people can rarely be brought to question principles which
+have become a part and parcel of their everyday existence. There are
+plenty of individuals who are ready to tinker with existing
+institutions, and who erroneously dignify that process by the name of
+reform. But nothing is more despairing than the effort to convince
+conventionally brought up people that some cherished convention, with
+which the world has put up for an indefinite period, is founded upon
+fallacy, and ought to be cast out root and branch.
+
+Even in the United States, where far greater efforts are made to
+encourage individuality in the schools and colleges than is the case
+with the countries of the Old World, people are not much better
+distributed amongst the various professions and occupations than they
+are here. I have made inquiries amongst Americans of wide experience and
+observation, and have learnt that nothing is more common in the States
+than to find individuals brought up to exercise functions for which they
+are wholly unfitted by natural capacity and inclination.
+
+An instance was given me, by an American friend, of a boy who spent all
+his leisure in constructing clever little mechanical contrivances, in
+running miniature locomotives, and in setting up electric appliances of
+one kind and another. One day the youth's father came to him and said:
+'I don't know what to make of B----. Could you find him a place in a
+wholesale merchant's office?' When it was pointed out to the parent that
+his son showed unmistakable mechanical genius, he obstinately insisted
+on getting the boy a situation for which he was quite unsuited, and
+which was highly distasteful to him.
+
+I quote this instance to show that the parent is often as bad an
+educator as the school itself. In this case the school would have taken
+as little notice of the boy's natural bent as his father. It would, in
+all probability, never have discovered it at all. But it has become so
+much an accepted axiom that children are to be manufactured into
+anything that happens to suit the taste or convenience of their
+guardians, that it probably never occurred to the parent in question
+that he was committing a cruel and foolish act in forcing his son out of
+the path into which the boy's natural instinct was guiding him. The
+youth who might have pursued a happy and prosperous career as a
+mechanical engineer is now a disappointed man, struggling on, with
+little hope of success, in an occupation which does not interest him,
+and for which he does not possess the slightest adaptability.
+
+Every nation is equally at fault in this respect. In Germany, for
+instance, the child is quite as much a pawn at the disposal of its
+parent and the school system as it is elsewhere. I spent a number of
+years in the country, and enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with many
+German families. Nothing has left upon my mind a deeper impression than
+the tragedy I witnessed of a boy being gradually and systematically
+weaned from the pursuit to which he was passionately devoted, and forced
+into a career utterly unsympathetic and distasteful to his peculiar
+temperament.
+
+The boy was simply, from head to foot, a musician. He spent every moment
+he could steal from his school studies in playing through the difficult
+scores of Wagner's music dramas. His taste, his musical memory, the
+enormous natural ability which enabled him to surmount all technical
+difficulties with ease, were apparent to everybody who knew him. Yet his
+parents determined from the first that he should study law, and enter
+the legal profession.
+
+I have never seen anything more painful than the deliberate
+discouragement, during a period extending over several years, of the
+boy's natural bent, and the application of absolute compulsion to force
+him, against every natural instinct, to prepare himself for a profession
+repugnant to his inclinations, and for which he was not in the smallest
+degree adapted.
+
+Out of this promising musical material the _Stadt Gymnasium_
+manufactured the usual piece of intellectual mediocrity. He was stuffed
+with the regulation measure of facts, scraped through the customary
+examination, and was despatched, much against his will, to the
+universities of Jena and Zuerich. When I last saw him he was a plodding
+lawyer of the conventional type, doing his duties in a listless manner,
+with very indifferent success, and quite broken down in spirit. The
+_Gymnasium_, the university, and the parental obstinacy had done their
+work very effectually. They had succeeded in reducing him to the level
+of a machine, and in all probability Germany lost an excellent musician
+who might have given pleasure to thousands of others, besides enjoying
+an honourable career of useful and congenial work.
+
+We have seen that between the stupidity of the parent and the
+inflexibility of the school system children have little chance of
+developing their natural propensities. The results surround us
+everywhere, and there is no getting away from them. All that the school
+professes to do is to stuff the pupil with a certain quantity of facts
+according to a fixed curriculum. It does not pretend to exercise any
+other function. There is no effort to differentiate between individuals,
+or to discover the natural bent of each particular child. Instruction
+consists in cramming and prescribing by a more or less pernicious
+method--according to the lights of the particular school authorities in
+some cases, and in others according to a hard and fast code enforced by
+the State--a certain quantity of facts into all pupils without
+distinction.
+
+Parents, on the other hand, think they have fulfilled their duty simply
+by sending their children to school. The only thing considered necessary
+to equip a child for the battle of life is to get him an education, and
+nobody bothers his head about the principles or the effects of the
+process. The parent leaves everything to the school, regardless of the
+fact that schools do not pretend to concern themselves about the
+natural tendencies of their pupils. He is satisfied if his son is
+receiving the same education as his neighbour's, and is quite contented
+to leave the question of his future career to be an after-consideration.
+
+The result upon the world in general of this double neglect on the part
+of parents and school systems is disastrous in the extreme. In the first
+place, it makes the life of the misplaced individual a burden to himself
+and to those by whom he is surrounded. Natural tendencies cannot be
+wholly suppressed, even by education systems; and the victim's existence
+is not rendered more bearable by the reflection that, but for
+circumstances which he is rarely able to analyze, he might have
+succeeded in some other and more agreeable occupation had he only
+received the necessary encouragement in his youth.
+
+Secondly, there is the fact that the progress of civilization is
+enormously retarded by its being rarely in the hands of the most fit.
+The most fit are not, and cannot be, produced under prevailing
+conditions. The whole machinery of education is directed towards the
+production of a dead level of mediocrity. In many cases--such as, for
+example, in Prussia--this is done by design, and not by accident.
+Instruction is imparted in such a manner that no regard is paid to
+individual propensities. All are subjected, more or less, to the same
+process. They are fitted for nothing in particular, and no trouble is
+taken to ascertain the direction in which an individual mind should be
+developed. The consequence is that, from one end of the civilized world
+to the other, resounds the cry, 'What shall we do with our boys?'
+
+And, lastly, it scarcely requires pointing out that the enormous sums of
+money spent by Governments, by municipalities, and by private persons
+upon education, in order to produce this lamentable state of affairs, is
+so much waste and extravagance. Not only does it bring in no practical
+return, but it works out in a precisely opposite direction. Schools and
+colleges that only serve to produce anomalous and unnatural social
+conditions, that stifle genius and talent, and that cause widespread
+misery among the unsuitably educated, must be reckoned as a national
+loss.
+
+People deplore the heavy sums spent on armaments and on the maintenance
+of enormous fleets and armies; but it may be doubted if this expenditure
+is as costly in the end as that which goes to support a systematic
+manufacture of the unfit, and to assist in the distribution of
+individuals to stations in the social scheme for which they are wholly
+unsuited.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE DESTRUCTION OF GENIUS
+
+
+Most people labour under the delusion that genius only makes its
+appearance twice or thrice during a generation. It is certainly the fact
+that a Napoleon, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven, is only born once in a
+century; and colossal intellects such as these are rightly regarded as
+unnatural phenomena. But genius of a less high order is far more common
+than is generally supposed. People are simply blind to it. Although it
+surrounds them on all sides, they fail to recognise it. And nearly
+everybody is busily engaged in helping to destroy it, with a perversity
+that is as unconscious as it is criminal.
+
+Those who have had the opportunity of observing the mental development
+of an intelligent child that has not been subjected to the ordinary
+processes of teaching, must have been struck with the originality of its
+mind. If children are left to themselves, they will breed ideas at an
+astonishing rate. Give an imaginative child of five or six some simple
+object, such as a button or a piece of tape, and it will weave round it
+a web of romance that would put many a poet or author to shame.
+
+Naturally brought up children will chatter fascinating nonsense to the
+very motes that float in a sunbeam; they will spin an Odyssey out of the
+most trivial incident that has chanced to impress them. Every
+commonplace object will be invested by them with mysterious and
+fantastic attributes. When left to observe facts for themselves, they
+will develop powers of reasoning and logic which no amount of cramming
+and caning would ever succeed in driving into them.
+
+There are probably few parents who have not been startled, at some
+period or another, by hearing from the lips of a child an original
+reflection that exhibited an unexpected degree of mental development.
+Did it ever occur to them that some intellectual process must have been
+going on in the child's mind to produce such powers of observation or
+thought? There is a fallacious notion, founded upon pure want of
+observation, that human beings are unable to form ideas or to think for
+themselves until they have been put through an elaborate course of
+mental gymnastics. A great deal of the process misnamed education is
+directed towards this end, with the result that in nine cases out of ten
+the brain is simply paralyzed and rendered incapable of performing its
+proper functions.
+
+The fact is, that people, whether young or old, cannot be forced to
+think. It is a habit that must come of its own accord, and that can only
+be stimulated by the most delicately-applied influences. Observant and
+reflective parents, who have not chosen to leave the entire development
+and upbringing of their children in the hands of nurses, will have
+noticed that there is a natural tendency on the part of a child, if not
+interfered with, to think and to expand its faculty of imagination. This
+tendency is not shared to an equal extent by all children; there are, of
+course, dissimilarities caused by varying degrees of intelligence. But
+it is there, in however rudimentary and undeveloped a stage; and the
+more backward it appears to be, the more care should be taken not to
+destroy it or to check its natural growth.
+
+Now, the whole machinery of education is brought to bear, from the
+moment the child is of an age to receive any instruction, to strangle
+the development of the thinking and imaginative faculties. That process
+will be described presently. What I wish to point out first is that,
+long before the school or the governess commences this operation, the
+parents of the child, or those to whom they have delegated the duty of
+taking charge of it during the tenderest and most momentous years of its
+existence, are generally engaged in doing everything they can to bring
+about the same pernicious result.
+
+Of course the evil is committed in sheer ignorance. But it has been bred
+for so many generations that individual judgment and common sense must
+every day be becoming more rare. Therefore the evil spreads, and people
+blame the introduction of railways and other mechanical improvements for
+the diminishing supply of artistic and creative genius, whilst they are
+in reality themselves busily employed in stifling its development.
+
+There are two ways in which this unhappy result is brought about. In
+the first place, there is the invariable custom of giving young children
+toys which, far from stimulating the imagination, only serve to impress
+upon their minds the commonplace facts of everyday life. It is really,
+only in a different form, a part of the process by which, later on, the
+education system drives out ideas and crams in facts.
+
+To take a concrete instance, a doll is the plaything usually given to
+little girls. At first sight nothing can appear more charming or
+instructive than the gift to a little girl, who will one day be a wife
+and a mother, of the miniature representation of a baby. There will be a
+bath provided, in which she may learn to wash it. Everything will be
+complete--soap, sponge, loofah, puff-box, and powder. The present will
+be accompanied by a _layette_, so that the child may learn to dress her
+infant and to change its clothes. Hair-brushes will teach her to keep
+the doll's hair neat; and probably a dozen other toilet requisites, of
+which the masculine mind has no notion or is expected to affect
+ignorance, will be found ready at hand to inculcate the lesson of
+nursery routine.
+
+In this ingenious way the materialistic side of life is deliberately
+forced upon the attention of the child. Everything is providently
+supplied that would be calculated to occupy her attention with
+commonplace facts instead of with fancies. The child is not encouraged
+to make a living creature of this inanimate dummy, to tell it stories,
+or to exercise her imagination in some other way. She is provided with a
+round of prosaic and extremely material duties, and her mind is
+carefully kept within these bounds by details of soap and
+feeding-bottles, which do not offer scope for any flight of imagination.
+
+It would be far better to place a bundle of rags in the arms of a little
+girl, and to tell her to imagine it to be a baby. She would, if left to
+herself, with no other resource than her own invention, soon learn to
+exercise her dormant powers of imagination and originality.
+
+With the same lack of forethought boys are surrounded from earliest
+infancy with objects designed to keep their minds within the narrow
+limits of fact. Their playthings are ships, fire-engines, miniature
+railways, water-pumps, and such-like. The imagination is allowed as
+little play as possible. Interest is carefully concentrated upon the
+mechanical details of spars, sails, rigging, watertight compartments,
+wheels, rods, cranks, levers, and the thousand-and-one items which go to
+make up a mechanical contrivance. Great care is taken in constructing
+toy models to reproduce at least the chief points of the original, in
+order to give them a supposititious educational value. The parents then
+fondly imagine that, in stocking the nursery with these abominations,
+they are largely assisting in the development of the boy's mind.
+
+To people who do not understand children it is difficult to convey any
+adequate idea of the fatal result produced upon the dawning intellect by
+this introduction of materialism into the nursery. The imaginative will
+at once say that the contention is too far fetched. Certainly the
+pernicious effects of such toys as have been described are not easily
+discernible; therein lies the insidiousness of this retarding process.
+But to those who have watched, as I have done, the natural development
+of an intelligent child's powers of reflection and imagination--unchecked
+by dolls or toy locomotives--there will be neither absurdity nor
+exaggeration in what I have written.
+
+Toys in themselves are harmless and unobjectionable things, though every
+observant person who has had much to do with young children will readily
+concede how superfluous they are as a means of amusement. The average
+child will treasure up a button or a shell long after it has destroyed,
+or maybe forgotten the existence of, the most elaborate and expensive
+toy. That is a commonplace of the nursery. But it does not seem to
+convey either meaning or moral to the majority of parents.
+
+The second way in which the thinking and imaginative faculties are
+impeded in their development is by the discouragement of, or by the
+injudicious answers given to, the questions asked by children. At a
+certain age the latter become inquisitive about everything in the
+universe. They ply their elders with perpetual questioning; and it must
+be acknowledged that many of their interrogations are highly
+inconvenient and unanswerable.
+
+It is very difficult for the average person to reply offhand to
+elementary questions such as, Why does the sun shine? What makes the
+wind blow? How does a seed grow into a tree? and so forth. Few people
+have the patience to answer the numerous inquiries of an intelligent
+child; and sooner than expose their ignorance, parents will generally
+quench this thirst for knowledge at the outset by a flat prohibition.
+The selfish desire for peace prompts them to refuse the solicited
+information altogether, or, worse still, to return answers calculated to
+kill imaginative ideas or to impress the child's mind with a bare and
+prosaic materialism.
+
+They do not stop to think of the immense harm that may be done to the
+child by throwing cold water upon its first attempts at research.
+Children, it must be remembered, do not possess the perseverance and
+determination which often come to the rescue of original genius at a
+later period. However active their minds may be, they are also timid,
+and shrink back quickly under the influence of unsympathetic treatment.
+
+The fact should be patent to everybody that children strive constantly
+to use the brains with which Nature has endowed them. Being naturally
+imaginative and original, these faculties only need ordinary
+encouragement to develop and flourish. Yet the entire method of bringing
+up children, from the cradle to the school bench, is directed towards
+stifling all originality and substituting for it a stock of commonplace
+ideas and conventional knowledge.
+
+The process is begun at home. It takes its root in conventionality, the
+curse of all individuality and progress. Parents, brought up to be the
+slaves of custom, carry on the imbecile traditions that have been handed
+down to them from former generations, without stopping to consider
+whether they are rational or foolish. It is good enough for the majority
+of people that the imbecile things they do were done by their
+forefathers before them; and no tradition is more rigidly followed than
+that which prescribes the manner of bringing up children.
+
+It would have been thought that those who had themselves suffered from
+the effects of bad methods would be careful not to repeat the mistakes
+with their own children. But that is the worst aspect of the evil. Its
+chief operation consists in hedging round the intelligence with
+conventionalities to such an extent as to exclude vigorous and
+independent thought. The most intelligent people often find the utmost
+difficulty in attempting to shake off the prejudices inculcated during
+the early years of life.
+
+Many, before accomplishing this end, have had to pass through a long
+period of suffering and adversity. But the average mind is generally a
+hopeless case. There must be strong inward impulses, or the necessary
+measure of initiative and courage will not be forthcoming. Everybody who
+chooses to think for himself knows that it is an operation which does
+not usually entail pleasant consequences.
+
+So much for the part played by the parent. The school system stands on a
+different plane altogether, and must be considered by itself. For
+parents there is, as has been pointed out, a certain amount of excuse.
+For the school system there is none.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+HUMAN FACTORIES
+
+
+Distinction must be made, of course, in discussing the effects of
+teaching methods upon children, between the various kinds of schools,
+and between public instruction and private tuition. It would not be fair
+to lump them all together, for the evils they produce are by no means
+distributed by them in equal proportion. One must differentiate.
+Fundamentally, all education is proceeding on a false principle. In this
+respect it is necessary to blame education systems, institutions, school
+teachers, tutors, governesses, and parents alike; for all are engaged in
+keeping up an educational delusion that is working great harm to the
+world in general.
+
+But when we come to consider the amount of evil produced by each of
+these factors, it will be seen at once that there is a good deal to
+choose between them. The private tutor, under present methods of
+teaching, is in a far better position to encourage the individual
+development of a child than is the schoolmaster who has the care of a
+class. Children can contend, to a certain extent, against the tyranny of
+the tutor; they can force their own wishes upon his attention should
+they possess the necessary strength of character. But the strongest
+must succumb to the school system. Here there is no latitude to
+particular pupils, no concession made to idiosyncrasies of mind or
+character. The system must not be relaxed, and in consequence everybody
+has to be subjected to precisely the same course of study.
+
+Children begin to receive instruction at a very early age. The usual
+plan is to take a child the moment it is able to string enough words
+together to form ideas, and to subject it to a methodical process of
+teaching. The custom of beginning what is called a child's education at
+a tender age is verified by the fact that the State now compels, or
+rather pretends to compel, parents to send their children to school at
+the age of five, whilst large numbers of the children of the poor are
+voluntarily sent to school at three years of age, or even younger. It
+will be observed, therefore, that the State, as far as the masses of the
+people are concerned, takes the child in hand at the most impressionable
+period of its existence.
+
+The instruction of infants is not a very difficult task, if all that is
+aimed at is to teach them certain elementary subjects. At five years of
+age children will generally learn with avidity. Their minds are just
+sufficiently formed to be receptive, and as all knowledge is a blank to
+them they are ready to learn anything, within the limits of their
+comprehension, that the teacher may choose to put before them. This
+would place upon the latter a very heavy responsibility if the matter
+were left entirely to his discretion. But this is by no means the case;
+the course of instruction is fixed beforehand by the school managers.
+It may differ slightly in schools of varying types; but in the main it
+is identical in all the essentials.
+
+To what extent this variation may occur is, however, entirely beside the
+point. What should be noted in this connection is that each school, and
+for the matter of that every private teacher, has a fixed plan of
+instruction which is more or less rigidly enforced. In the case of the
+school, as has already been stated, no attention whatever is paid to
+individual requirements. All are subjected to exactly the same process,
+for better or for worse. The child, therefore, as soon as it begins to
+attend school is compelled to learn certain things.
+
+The stock subjects are reading, writing, and arithmetic. They are
+necessary accomplishments in all stations of life, and education without
+them would be practically impossible. I do not disparage them in the
+least. But there is a good deal to be said about the method of teaching
+them, and the grave error of making them the principal objective of
+elementary teaching.
+
+In this connection it is both interesting and instructive to note a
+significant alteration in the Day School Code issued by the Board of
+Education. Until quite recently reading, writing, and arithmetic were
+classed under the Code as 'obligatory subjects' in infant schools.
+Article 15 of the Code now reads: 'The course of instruction in infant
+schools and classes should, as a rule, include--Suitable instruction,
+writing, and numbers,' etc. Compare this with the same passage contained
+in former Codes. 'The subjects of instruction,' it runs, 'for which
+grants may be made are the following: (a) OBLIGATORY SUBJECTS--Reading,
+writing, arithmetic; hereinafter called "the elementary subjects,"' etc.
+
+This amendment is a recognition of the fact that nothing can be more
+detrimental to education than hard-and-fast rules. It is a protest
+against the general assumption that the curricula of schools must be of
+a more or less uniform pattern, and puts an end to the absurdity of the
+central authority prescribing subjects to be taught in all elementary
+schools, regardless of varying circumstances or the possibility of
+improved methods of teaching.
+
+Formerly the pernicious custom existed of examining the pupils, at the
+annual visit of the inspector, in stereotyped subjects. Matthew Arnold,
+reporting to the Education Department in 1867, observed: 'The mode of
+teaching in the primary schools has certainly fallen off in
+intelligence, spirit, and inventiveness during the four or five years
+which have elapsed since my last report. It could not well be otherwise.
+In a country where everyone is prone to rely too much on mechanical
+processes, and too little on intelligence, a change in the Education
+Department's regulations, which, by making two-thirds of the Government
+grant depend upon a mechanical examination, inevitably gives a
+mechanical turn to the school teaching, a mechanical turn to the
+inspection, is, and must be, trying to the intellectual life of the
+school. In the inspection the mechanical examination of individual
+scholars in reading a short passage, writing a short passage, and
+working two or three sums, cannot but take the lion's share of room and
+importance, inasmuch as two-thirds of the Government grant depend upon
+it.... In the game of mechanical contrivances the teachers will in the
+end beat us; and as it is now found possible, by ingenious preparation,
+to get children through the Revised Code examination in reading,
+writing, and ciphering without their really knowing how to read, write,
+and cipher, so it will with practice no doubt be found possible to get
+the three-fourths of the one-fifth of the children over six through the
+examination in grammar, geography, and history without their really
+knowing any one of these three matters.'
+
+Throughout the whole of his career as an inspector of elementary schools
+Arnold had to reiterate this complaint again and again. He saw the
+incentive to cramming provided by the mode of distributing the grants,
+and he perceived the uselessness of the type of instruction engendered
+by it.
+
+To-day all this has been changed. There is no such thing now as a
+compulsory annual examination in the three elementary subjects. It has
+been finally abolished by the central authority. The duty of the
+inspectors is no longer to examine the children, but to investigate the
+methods of teaching, the qualifications of the teachers, and so forth.
+They are, it is true, empowered to examine children when they think it
+advisable to do so; but they are directed to use this power sparingly,
+and in exceptional cases.
+
+The Department at Whitehall does not, unfortunately, exist for the
+purpose of abolishing education systems. It has been called into
+existence for the sole purpose of distributing grants of public money in
+aid of elementary education and for the support of training-colleges for
+teachers. The exercise of this function has necessitated the framing of
+a code of regulations to be observed by schools wishing to qualify
+themselves for the grant. This code is revised each year, and has
+undergone some remarkable changes of late. There is a distinct tendency
+to make it as elastic as possible, with the obvious aim of encouraging
+variety in the schools and in the methods of teaching.
+
+For an example of this tendency one need only compare the present
+conditions attaching to the payment of the principal grant to infant
+schools with those that were in force a few years ago. The higher grant
+was formerly given if the scholars were taught under a certificated
+teacher, or under a teacher not less than eighteen years of age,
+approved by the inspector, and in a room properly constructed and
+furnished for the instruction of infants. There was also a proviso that
+the infants should be taught 'suitably to their age.' The new code
+contains the following regulation:
+
+'A principal grant of 17s. or 16s. is made to infant schools and
+classes. The Board shall decide which, if either, of these grants shall
+be paid after considering the report and recommendation of the inspector
+upon each of the following four points: (a) The suitability of the
+instruction to the circumstances of the children and the neighbourhood;
+(b) the thoroughness and intelligence with which the instruction is
+given; (c) the sufficiency and suitability of the staff; (d) the
+discipline and organization.'
+
+Working in this spirit, the Board of Education is able to mitigate some
+of the evils of a State system. But it cannot attack them at the roots
+without initiating a complete revolution. Out and out reforms of this
+kind are only politically practicable when they are demanded by the
+irresistible voice of a strong public opinion. The public are misled as
+to the true issues by the intrigues of political parties. The conflict
+is narrowed down by party politicians, who have particular interests to
+serve, to a mere squabble about school boards, voluntary schools, local
+authorities, and religious instruction.
+
+The consequence is that these side issues have come to be regarded as
+the great education question of the day. It is not easy to stir up any
+deep feeling about the comparative merits of the two classes of
+elementary schools. Most people do not care a jot whether their children
+go to one or the other. It is not the masses who agitate about
+denominational or secular teaching, but those limited classes who have
+some direct interest in matters affecting religion.
+
+But who would not cast aside their lethargy, if they were made to
+understand that the question to be decided is not whether this or that
+type of school should be supported, but whether the present system of
+education should be entirely discarded in favour of an altogether new
+plan? that behind all these petty controversies lie great issues,
+affecting the fundamental principles of education, which must be pushed
+to the front unless the degeneration of the race--an inevitable result
+of the present educational method--is to be continued indefinitely?
+
+Let people consider for a moment what is effected by the present system.
+The child, as we have seen, is taken by the State at an early age and
+subjected, for the most part, to a careful drilling in the three
+elementary subjects. There is no harm in knowing how to read and write;
+it is a very necessary accomplishment. A little arithmetic is also
+indispensable to the fulfilment of many of the commonest duties of
+everyday life. But, apart from the iniquity of cramming or forcing the
+brain in a particular direction, it must be recollected that by imposing
+certain subjects upon the undeveloped mind of a child, others are
+necessarily excluded. The process therefore, when rigidly carried out,
+has very serious and far-reaching effects. It prevents the development
+of the mind in any direction but that which is being enforced.
+
+The harm done to the individual child by this means is incalculable. On
+the very threshold of the development of its faculties according to
+natural instincts this development is violently arrested by an
+artificial operation. Nor does the evil end here. This interference with
+Nature is carried on throughout the whole school career of the child,
+and the tradition flourishes in a modified form in the colleges and
+universities. It is, in fact, the vital principle of modern education.
+
+These schools in which the children of the people are taught are nothing
+more than factories for turning out a uniformly-patterned article. They
+do not succeed in their object of conferring what is called an
+education upon their pupils, but they contrive to drive out all original
+ideas without implanting any useful knowledge in their place. The
+general result of this wholesale manufacture of dummies will be dealt
+with directly. The intention here is merely to point out that the
+practical working of the machinery of State education is to check the
+natural development of the mind, and to unfit those whom it has
+victimized, not only for one, but for all occupations that demand manual
+dexterity or practical intelligence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE GREATEST MISERY OF THE GREATEST NUMBER
+
+
+It is now time to consider the effect of this system of compulsory
+education upon the masses of the people. In the first two chapters an
+attempt was made to sketch some of the anomalies brought about by the
+educational methods of our public schools and universities, and by the
+pernicious system of public competitive examinations. We will now turn
+our attention exclusively to the masses, and endeavour to see what
+national instruction does for them.
+
+The common people labour under the delusion that children who have
+passed the standards of an elementary school are educated. They have
+been fitted, according to the popular belief, for a superior station in
+life. The first ambition of parents is, therefore, for their child to
+obtain a post suitable to its supposed scholarship.
+
+Of course, the truth is, as we all know, that the product of the public
+elementary school is utterly useless, and generally wanting in
+intelligence. But these facts are only discovered by the victims
+themselves after years of bitter experience. Totally unfitted for any
+station in life, many of them leave school full of self-confidence in
+the belief that their superior education will secure them a good
+opening. Despising all manual labour, they seek situations as clerks,
+shop-assistants, and such-like. The result is, of course, an over-supply
+of candidates for employment of this kind. In consequence, the girls
+have to fall back upon domestic service; while the boys swell the ranks
+of unskilled labourers and unemployed loafers, or, worse still, betake
+themselves to a life of dishonesty.
+
+Nowhere are the evil effects of this education system more strikingly
+illustrated than in the country districts. The children of agricultural
+labourers and small farmers are given instruction which will be of no
+earthly use to them in the occupation for which they are naturally
+fitted. Instead of being prepared for country pursuits, they are given
+an inferior type of all-round education which is equally useless
+everywhere. When they leave school they can read, write, add, subtract,
+divide, and multiply--after a fashion; they can mispronounce a few
+French words, without being able to construct a single grammatical
+sentence or understand a syllable that is said to them; they know enough
+shorthand to write down simple words at one half the speed of ordinary
+handwriting; and they have acquired by rote a few dry facts from history
+and geography, all of which will be totally obliterated from their
+memories within a space of twelve months.
+
+Shorthand is not a very promising preparation for the plough; and French
+and mathematics are equally valueless accomplishments for the carting of
+manure. Dairymaids need neither history nor geography; they can even do
+without grammar. Consequently these unhappy school-children have been
+rendered useless for all the practical purposes of the life they ought
+to lead. The result is inevitable. There is a constant, never-ceasing
+exodus from the country into the towns. The rural school victims are
+incited to look for employment in an altogether different sphere from
+that for which nature originally intended them.
+
+Philosophers and politicians crack their heads over this mysterious
+problem of town immigration; but it is really a very simple affair. We
+are pretending to educate the rural population by conferring upon them
+the blessings of French and shorthand. The natural consequence of our
+excellent foresight in spreading this type of culture throughout the
+land is that there is a scarcely remarkable dearth of rural labour. Farm
+hands are not quite as plentiful as they used to be, and there is some
+difficulty in getting damsels to churn butter. But, on the other hand,
+we are driving this mob of cultured yokels into the towns to crowd out
+local labour, to starve, and to fill the gaols and workhouses.
+
+London has at the present moment mainly to thank this process of
+'education' for the overcrowding problem which is becoming every day
+more dangerous and pressing. It is useless to talk of pulling down slums
+and building up model blocks, or of inventing fresh means of
+communication to convey artisans to suburban dwellings, whilst the real
+cause of the evil is left untouched. Young men and women will continue
+to pour in from the country districts as long as a smattering of
+geography and arithmetic flatters them into the delusion that they are
+educated, and that knowledge of the useless kind that has been drummed
+into them is the high-road to fortune.
+
+It is, however, of little use to urge overcrowding as a ground for
+reforming educational methods. Few people are stirred by what to them is
+a purely abstract question. They see nothing to indicate its existence,
+and they know nothing of its evils. They seldom walk down the dreary
+avenues of bricks and mortar which contain the houses of the working
+classes; and if they do, they scarcely realize the fact that inside the
+humble, dingy little dwellings whole families are crowded into single
+rooms, share each other's beds, and are even thankful to find sleeping
+accommodation upon the floor.
+
+But everybody appreciates and understands the servant question. That
+touches the comfort of the individual too nearly to be ignored. The
+rapid extinction of good servants, the insolence and inefficiency of the
+average domestic--these are facts of everyday life that will come home
+to the suffering upper and middle classes. It is not because they are
+educated that domestic servants have deteriorated, however, but on
+account of the profound state of ignorance in which their elementary
+schooling has left them, leading them to the misapprehension that, from
+the standpoint of culture, they are as good as anybody and certainly
+above their menial position.
+
+Servants have as little need of French verbs and hieroglyphics as the
+ploughboy or the dairymaid. There are many useful things that might be
+learnt by a person who wished to be trained for domestic service; but
+it is rare enough to find a cook that, amongst other items of a liberal
+education, has been given cooking lessons. In this respect education is
+like food: what is one man's meat is another man's poison. We do not
+wish to teach book-keeping to a washerwoman, or fancy ironing to a
+private secretary. Then, why stuff artisans, domestic servants, and farm
+labourers with common denominators and the rules of syntax? It may be
+highly satisfactory to schoolteachers to succeed in making their class
+read aloud passages from Shakespeare and Milton without dropping more
+than fifty per cent. of the aspirates, or mispronouncing more than half
+a dozen multi-syllabic words. But, unfortunately, there is no demand for
+parlourmaids who can quote 'Hamlet' amid the intervals of waiting at
+table, or for page-boys capable of spouting 'Paradise Lost' for the
+intellectual improvement of the servants' hall.
+
+Perhaps these instances show as well as anything the grotesque absurdity
+of collecting a number of children together, and attempting to teach
+them things that they are not fitted to do, whilst no effort is made to
+cultivate in each individual the faculties that are really capable of
+development. It is not in the least surprising that occupations
+involving manual labour are for the most part filled with dissatisfied
+and incompetent grumblers, who have been obligingly provided by a State
+system of education.
+
+But if any further illustration be needed of the superficiality and
+harmfulness of the education forced upon the masses, we have it
+glaringly enough in the cheap literature of to-day. This stupendous
+mass of bosh could not have been produced unless there were a demand for
+it. Some people are never tired of abusing the millionaires who have
+made their fortunes by providing the illiterate nonsense that forms the
+intellectual food of the vast majority of the public. It is wholly
+unjustifiable and illogical to blame them. They are not founders of new
+schools of thought in the field of literature; they are men of business,
+and do not pretend to be anything worse. As such, it is their vocation
+to find out what the public want, and to supply it to them. They have no
+interest in making the million take their literature after it has been
+passed through a mincer. They chop up news and hash grammar at half
+price because the patrons of cheap papers and periodicals like their
+literature served up in that fashion.
+
+It is not the millionaire trader who is to blame for this state of
+affairs--he merely profits by its existence. The real culprit is the
+education system, which is the universal provider of the peculiar type
+of culture that interests itself in the number of beef sandwiches that
+would be required to encircle the earth, or the rate at which the
+population of the world would have to increase within a given time to
+enable its inhabitants, by mounting upon each other's heads, to reach
+the moon.
+
+The enormous demand for this class of literature is the most pregnant
+evidence of the miserable effects of misapplied education and defective
+instruction that could well be brought forward. But it is by no means
+confined to the uncultured masses who have been driven through the
+standards of an elementary school. Thousands who have been put through
+the paces of what is called 'higher education' may be seen in
+railway-carriages, at health resorts, or in the public libraries, deeply
+immersed in cheap-jack reading-matter that no self-respecting person of
+moderate intelligence would care even to be capable of specifying.
+
+This painful sight, which cannot have escaped the notice of the least
+observant, must surely lead the reflective man or woman to doubt the
+value of educational methods that have led to no better result. It is
+monstrous to think of years spent in grinding out syntax rules,
+mathematics, Latin, French, geography, science, history, composition,
+and a dozen other branches of knowledge, in order to develop a taste for
+sensational rags, middle-class magazines, and inferior fiction.
+
+If the process were coupled with no worse consequences than this, nobody
+of the least pretension to culture would wish to see it continued
+another day. But we have seen that the mischief goes far beyond mere
+superficiality and bad taste. It carries its pernicious influence into
+every social problem by which modern statesmen are perplexed and
+harassed. From the housing question to the dearth of servants we feel
+its baneful effects. And as if it were not enough to have unfitted the
+masses of the people for the occupations best suited to the great bulk
+of them, to have instilled into the minds of working-men's children, by
+means of illiterate Shakespeare recitations and burlesque efforts to
+grasp geography, a contempt for the skilled labour of the artisan--this
+education process has brought about a general deterioration in the
+manners of the lower classes that has long been a subject of general
+complaint.
+
+Nobody wishes to see the common people in a constant attitude of
+servility towards the classes above them. To thinking people nothing is
+more painful than to observe such signs of a want of proper self-respect
+and independence on the part of freeborn men and women of whatever
+standing in the social scale. But it is a significant fact that
+educating the masses, in the sense in which that term seems to be
+generally employed, has had the effect of eradicating from them all
+respect for education. The educated man of real attainments is not
+looked up to in the smallest degree by the average individual of the
+lower orders. It would be useless to quote, in support of a statement
+made in the presence of unexceptional members of the working classes,
+the opinion of any recognised authority. For the matter of that, there
+are many persons of a higher rank who are supposed to have enjoyed the
+benefits of a more liberal type of education than that afforded by the
+elementary school, who are equally unimpressed by the value of expert
+knowledge.
+
+Whether it is that State-educated youths think that their
+accomplishments have made them the equals of everybody else, or whether
+the inanity of the system to which they have been subjected has given
+them a contempt for learning, it would be difficult to determine.
+Probably both misconceptions are evenly distributed amongst the victims
+of the process. But the fact that this should be the case at all speaks
+eloquently for the crass ignorance which results from the confounding,
+on the part of so-called educationists, of mere fact-cramming and
+subject-compulsion with the proper development of the human faculties.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE OUTPUT OF PRIGS
+
+
+Having considered the evils produced by sham education, such as is
+compulsorily given to the masses of the people, we can proceed to
+examine into the average results effected by more genuine and efficient
+systems of cramming and instruction. It is not in the least degree
+necessary, for this purpose, to go into minute comparisons of the
+various types of secondary schools and colleges that have been
+established in this country. In the actual method of teaching there is
+little to choose between them. All have practically a common aim,
+namely, the preparation of boys and young men for examinations.
+
+Of course, all boys who go to school are not destined for professions
+that necessitate the passing of an examination, competitive or
+otherwise. But that does not disturb the school authorities a jot, or
+involve the slightest relaxation of the school system. The boys are
+crammed just the same. Whoever wishes to pass through the mill must go
+in like a pig at one end and come out as a sausage at the other. There
+is no middle course except the private tutor; and he, owing to the
+defects of his own early training and to the terrific Conservatism
+peculiar to his profession, probably knows no better process than the
+familiar routine of cram and idea-suppression.
+
+The whole of school life is a scramble for marks. The school managers
+and masters are interested in getting the boys stuffed with facts,
+dates, figures, and inflections, because the prestige of the school--and
+consequently its commercial success--is mainly dependent upon the
+creditable placing of pupils in public examinations. Therefore the boys
+are encouraged, or rather compelled, to occupy themselves with what will
+best conduce to secure this object, regardless of their own wishes or
+obvious inclinations.
+
+A boy might enter a grammar-school, or one of the great public schools,
+teeming to his finger-tips with an inborn thirst for scientific
+knowledge; he might spend all his spare moments making crude experiments
+with an air-pump, or gazing at planets through a cheap astronomical
+telescope; he might fail dismally to grasp the rudiments of the Latin
+grammar, and be incapable of conjugating an irregular verb; but his nose
+would be kept down to the grindstone of the school curriculum all the
+same, and not the smallest attention paid to his obvious bent of mind.
+
+He had been placed there, the authorities would say, to receive a
+general education, and a general education he should have. If during the
+process all the scientific enthusiasm is ground out of him, that is not
+the business of the schoolmaster. The boy, for the ordinary purposes of
+instruction, is an empty bottle into which a certain prescription is to
+be poured. The prescription has been made up beforehand, and cannot be
+altered. The school undertakes to administer a draught, but it refuses
+to bother about diagnosing each case. There is only one method of
+treatment, and every patient who enters the establishment has to be
+submitted to it.
+
+There have been, of course, enlightened pedagogues. The names of Arnold
+and Thring will always stand out prominently in the history of English
+school life, and it will be a bad day indeed for the youth in our public
+schools when their traditional influence shall have been entirely
+obliterated. They grafted upon the established methods of teaching a
+liberal and broad-minded effort to bring out what was best in each pupil
+by other influences. 'It is no wisdom,' Dr. Arnold declared, 'to make
+boys prodigies of information; but it is our wisdom and our duty to
+cultivate their faculties each in its season, first the memory and
+imagination, and then the judgment; to furnish them with the means, and
+to excite the desire of improving themselves, and to wait with
+confidence God's blessing on the result.'
+
+Edward Thring wrote the following remarks in his diary:
+
+'Education is not bookworm work, but the giving the subtle power of
+observation, the faculty of seeing, the eye and mind to catch hidden
+truths and new creative genius. If the cursed rule-mongering and
+technical terms could be banished to limbo, something might be done.
+Three parts of teaching and learning in England is the hiding common
+sense and disguising ignorance under phrases.'
+
+No stranger anomaly can be conceived than that presented by the
+constant effort of these two eminent headmasters to undo the evils of a
+universal system of education. It is not often that people strive to set
+their house in order after this fashion, and all honour is due to them
+for the courageous endeavour. The mistake they made was in tinkering
+with a system inherently bad and useless, instead of taking the bold
+step of abolishing it altogether and beginning afresh on new and sound
+principles.
+
+The energies of schoolmasters of the type of Thring and Arnold are, in
+fact, concentrated mainly upon a constant struggle to prevent the
+ordinary process of school instruction from producing prigs. Stupid boys
+are generally rendered more stupid by teaching, for reasons that will be
+analyzed later on. But boys whose brains are amenable to academic
+training are liable, unless the environment of the school is peculiarly
+unfavourable to the development of the species, to become priggish.
+
+It is the purely academic training that produces the prig. Football,
+cricket, and other athletic sports are not favourable to his growth; and
+he receives equally little encouragement from his companions. The
+important point about him is that he is not a natural product at all,
+but the outcome of an artificial drilling of the mind. In a word, he is
+the embodiment of the education system, uncorrected by fortuitous
+influences and conditions. Everybody knows that gracefulness is not
+acquired by means of stilted lessons in deportment, but that it consists
+of natural muscular movement untrammelled by self-consciousness or
+artifice. The same law of nature applies to the working of the brain.
+Stuffing a boy's head with so much knowledge is not developing his mind,
+and the result must necessarily be as artificial as the process. The
+mind becomes incapable of thinking individually and naturally; it
+becomes pedantic and circumscribed, powerless to give simple expression
+to simple thoughts; and the prig is made.
+
+It requires a great deal of kicking and hustling on the part of the
+victim's schoolfellows to arrest this process, and the cure is generally
+only effected outwardly. Priggishness cannot be eradicated from the
+system in a moment, even by the most heroic measures. Its excision
+involves a slow mental process, the converse of that which served to
+call it into existence. The prig has to divest himself of the false
+mental outlook imposed upon him by his education, and to begin all over
+again. It is a hard lesson which can only be learnt in the school of
+life, generally after humiliating experience and bitter suffering. Many
+never succeed in learning it. There must be some material to work upon,
+and probably their individuality, weak at the commencement and therefore
+doubly in need of tender treatment and fostering care, has been
+hopelessly crushed out of existence by the conventional training of
+school and university.
+
+Under present conditions prigs can and do grow up everywhere. In some
+educational institutions--notably in great public schools like Eton and
+Harrow--they are more discouraged than in others; but the cramming
+system has reached such proportions that all schools and colleges are
+affected in a greater or less degree. They infect our public life, as
+we have seen; largely recruit our public service; and are in evidence in
+the pulpit, at the schoolmaster's desk, on public platforms, in the
+lecture-room of the university, and wherever the services of educated
+men are employed.
+
+The ideals of men like Arnold and Thring cannot be carried out as long
+as the examination system puts a premium upon cramming. 'I call that the
+best theme,' said Dr. Arnold, alluding to original composition, 'which
+shows that the boy has read and thought for himself; that the next best,
+which shows that he has read several books, and digested what he has
+read; and that the worst, which shows that he has followed but one book,
+and followed that without reflection.'
+
+There is no time nowadays for a boy to read and think for himself.
+Besides the examinations inside his own school for which he has to be
+prepared, there are scholarships, university examinations, competitive
+examinations for the civil service, and a host of other possibilities of
+the kind, all of which necessitate the acquisition of an enormous number
+of useless facts in every branch of learning.
+
+Too much attention is concentrated on the admirable physical product of
+the athletic side of our public school and university life. This
+advantage of the English system of education has been dwelt upon to such
+an extent, that people are apt to overlook the fact that, side by side
+with these fine specimens of healthy and for the most part
+unintellectual manhood, we are manufacturing a purely academic article
+of the least inspired and most retrogressive description.
+
+If somebody, wishing to make you acquainted with a friend, says to you:
+'I want you to meet So-and-so; he was at Eton and Trinity Hall, and came
+out tenth in the mathematical tripos,' you know exactly the kind of man
+to whom you are going to be introduced. He will have a very proper
+contempt for made-up ties, and will refuse to fasten the bottom button
+of his waistcoat. You know beforehand the precise point of view that he
+will take upon every conceivable topic, and the channels in which his
+conversation is certain to flow.
+
+His entire mental horizon will be bounded by academic conventionalities
+in such a cast-iron fashion that it would, you are well aware, waste
+your time to attempt to extend its boundaries by the fraction of an
+inch. If you say anything yourself out of the beaten track, you know
+that you will be looked down upon as a fool or a faddist. The Eton stamp
+will be upon his dress and manners; the Cambridge brand seared into
+every crevice of his mind. There will be an individuality about him, but
+it will be an individuality shared in common with hundreds of young men
+of the same educational antecedents.
+
+That is the fault of the system. It takes away, or fails to evoke, the
+distinguishing traits of each individual, and substitutes a kind of
+manufactured personality according to the particular institution, or
+type of institution, in which the educational metamorphosis has taken
+place. 'A mob of boys,' said the man who raised Uppingham from complete
+obscurity to the front rank of public schools, 'cannot be educated.' It
+is, nevertheless, the process that is going on all over the civilized
+world. Reform does not lie alone in making instruction itself more
+effective. As long as the principle is retained of forcing certain facts
+and certain subjects into the mind of every boy, the country will
+continue to breed conventionality, to produce a uniform type of useless
+mediocrity, and to make prigs.
+
+This is, unfortunately, exactly what the average educationist aims at.
+There is no disguise about the belief that conventional ideas, and the
+manufacture of what is called average ability, are the sheet-anchor of
+the State. And this type of fossilized Conservatism seems to grow in
+proportion to the number of schools and colleges in the country.
+
+Lower-middle-class young men, of no intellectual predisposition at all,
+are being turned out on all sides crammed with the narrowest type of
+educational tradition. Prigs are produced wholesale; the worst and most
+odious branch of the family being the semi-illiterate prig--the man who
+gets drummed out of decent regimental messes, the man who wants to go on
+the stage and declaim Shakespeare through his nose, the man who
+vulgarizes the public service by dropping his h's in the great
+Government departments, and others too numerous to be specified.
+
+Everything is vulgar that pretends to be what it is not. Priggishness is
+an artificial mental condition that is far more common than people
+generally suspect. We are most of us prigs, if we only knew it. The man
+who is unable to get rid of conventions and to think for himself is a
+prig. England is peopled with them. We meet them at every turn; we see
+them driving the country to the dogs by sheer inability to grasp its
+needs;--and we send our sons to the schools and universities to be
+manufactured after the same pattern.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+BOY DEGENERATION
+
+
+If some boys thrive, according to ordinary school standards, on the
+cramming system, what becomes of those to whose nature the process is
+entirely antagonistic?
+
+The question is best answered by a glance at the schools themselves.
+Take one of the great public schools, and it will be found that much the
+same conditions are prevalent in every class or form. There is a small
+percentage of boys at the top of each class who are considered the most
+intelligent, and by whom most of the questions asked by the master are
+answered. The remaining majority are divided into two sections, one of
+which consists of what are termed boys of average ability, whilst the
+other contains the lazy element, the refractory boys, and the dullards.
+
+In the last chapter we chiefly discussed those individuals who may be
+taken as representing the average of the best results achieved by higher
+schools and universities. These form, however, only a fraction of the
+scholars who pass through such institutions. It still remains for us to
+discover the role which is played by the other four-fifths in
+school-life. According to scholastic methods of classification, the
+bulk of this residue are boys of medium intelligence who plod on without
+specially distinguishing themselves, and contrive, by dint of industry
+and application, to blunder through the ordinary course of study without
+coming to grief.
+
+It would be difficult to conjure up a more melancholy picture than that
+presented by these plodders, whose work is rendered trebly hard by being
+performed against the grain. They suffer more under the system than the
+dull, the lazy, and the fractious, who escape its worst evils, either
+because some active power of resistance comes to their rescue, or
+because the mind itself is so formed as to be incapable of receiving
+instruction imparted on the cramming principle.
+
+But the average mediocrity amongst schoolboys are often inferior in
+ability both to those who rank above and below them in school
+attainment. They neither profit by the teaching process, nor do they
+possess those qualities that would enable them to resist its
+consequences. Thus they fall between two stools, being carried out of
+their natural sphere, and at the same time failing to attain such a
+measure of artificial success as would afford them compensation for the
+injury.
+
+Success in life is not an easy thing to generalize about. It is,
+however, important to note as far as possible the results brought about
+by school education. The boy who is trained to pass examinations has a
+respectable chance of getting into some branch of the public service;
+and, as we have seen, it is from amongst his ranks that the permanent
+officials of the various departments of Government are recruited. A
+great number of those who distinguish themselves academically also pass
+into the teaching profession; though a considerable percentage of
+graduates, for reasons that will be discussed in due course, drift into
+the ranks of the unemployed.
+
+The average schoolboy, who does his work mechanically and without
+enthusiasm, probably furnishes the greatest number of examples of the
+misplaced individual. His application to his studies is not natural; it
+is enforced by what is called school discipline. That is to say, the
+authorities devise every conceivable form of punishment to make a
+constant grind at obligatory subjects less disagreeable than the
+consequences of idleness. These are the simple arts by means of which
+unwilling boys are driven, like cattle, along the highway of what is
+termed, by an inaccurate application of the English language, knowledge.
+
+Anybody who has been coerced, and _poena_ed, and flogged through the
+curriculum of a public school will acknowledge that the performance is
+not an exhilarating one for the victim. It is preposterous to dignify
+this nigger-driving by the term 'education.' One might as well talk of
+the Chinese eagerly embracing Christianity, when, as a matter of fact,
+the missionaries have been forced upon them, like their foreign trade,
+at the point of the bayonet.
+
+The wonder is that anybody survives the process and retains his sanity.
+That many nervous temperaments and highly-gifted minds do not survive it
+is a point of so much importance that it will be dealt with later on in
+a separate chapter. What needs emphasizing here is that to make boys do
+certain things under compulsion is not developing their faculties, but
+is absolutely preventing their development; and secondly, that this
+infamous but universal proceeding is responsible for a positive
+degeneration amongst those whom it is supposed to educate and improve.
+
+Dr. Arnold held that a low standard of schoolboy morality was
+inevitable. 'With regard to reforms at Rugby,' he wrote to a friend,
+'give me credit, I must beg of you, for a most sincere desire to make it
+a place of Christian education. At the same time, my object will be, if
+possible, to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope
+to make; I mean that, from the natural imperfect state of boyhood, they
+are not susceptible of Christian principles in their full development
+upon their practice, and I suspect that a low standard of morals in many
+respects must be tolerated amongst them, as it was on a larger scale in
+what I consider the boyhood of the human race.'
+
+In a letter to another friend he spoke still more strongly on the
+subject. 'Since I began this letter,' he wrote, 'I have had some of the
+troubles of school-keeping; and one of those specimens of the evil of
+boy nature which makes me always unwilling to undergo the responsibility
+of advising any man to send his son to a public school. There has been a
+system of persecution carried on by the bad against the good, and then,
+when complaint was made to me, there came fresh persecution on that very
+account, and divers instances of boys joining in it out of pure
+cowardice, both physical and moral, when, if left to themselves, they
+would rather have shunned it. And the exceedingly small number of boys
+who can be relied on for active and steady good on these occasions, and
+the way in which the decent and respectable of ordinary life (Carlyle's
+"Shams") are sure on these occasions to swim with the stream and take
+part with the evil, makes me strongly feel exemplified what the
+Scriptures say about the strait gate and the wide one--a view of human
+nature which, when looking on human life in its full dress of decencies
+and civilizations, we are apt, I imagine, to find it hard to realize.
+But here, in the nakedness of boy nature, one is quite able to
+understand how there could not be found so many as even ten righteous in
+a whole city.'
+
+This sweeping statement has been quoted because it comes with double
+force from an undisputed authority such as the late Dr. Arnold.
+Everybody who has had experience of school-life knows that the average
+boy spends a great deal of his time in cheating the masters, lying to
+the authorities, and playing every sort and kind of mischievous or
+disreputable prank that comes into his head. But it is better to have
+this fact testified to by a man who has been in a position to observe
+large numbers of boys over a very extended period. The accusation of
+exaggeration or hasty generalization cannot then be well sustained.
+
+Where, however, I venture to differ with Dr. Arnold is in the assumption
+that this low standard of morality must be ascribed to boy nature alone.
+Undoubtedly this is the case in part. But there is a far more potent
+cause than natural instinct. It is to be found in the system of
+education which not only fails to develop and encourage the boy's
+individual tastes or faculties, but actually forces upon him occupations
+that are, for the most part, absolutely foreign to his nature. This is
+the real key to the vagaries of boyhood, and without such an explanation
+one must hold, with the great headmaster of Rugby, that boy nature is
+inherently bad.
+
+Boys, like other rational beings, must have their interests and
+amusements. If the legitimate and normal ones are prohibited, solace
+will be sought in those which are illegitimate and abnormal. By failing
+to encourage the faculties that nature intended a particular boy to
+develop, a vacuum is created. This vacuum must be filled up, and it is
+no earthly use trying to fill it up, against the grain, with
+mathematical problems or the irregular inflections of Latin verbs. The
+average boy is as little capable of taking an absorbing interest in
+these exhilarating features of the school curriculum as would be the
+average Hottentot.
+
+Every healthy boy stores up energy. It should be the first object of the
+schoolmaster--if such a being ought to have any existence at all--to see
+that this energy is not allowed to waste. Natural forces of this kind do
+not, it must be recollected, evaporate. There they are, and the laws of
+nature have decreed that they shall be constantly expended and renewed.
+If this or that boy's store of energy is not turned into one channel, it
+will expend itself through another. If the schoolmaster were to take
+the trouble to find out the particular bent of a pupil, and were then to
+proceed to foster and educate it, all the energy of the boy would be
+used in this useful and congenial work. But this can never be the case
+until the present methods of instruction have been revolutionized.
+
+The discipline upon which schools pride themselves so much is an
+altogether false and pernicious discipline. The only liberty which is
+vouchsafed to schoolboys is outside of their work. No doubt it is an
+excellent thing that boys should be free to choose the manner in which
+they make use of their leisure hours. There would be a great uproar
+amongst parents if their sons were forbidden to join in the games they
+wished to play, and compelled to play those for which they had no taste.
+It would be considered monstrous to remove a boy who was a capital
+bowler from the cricket-field, and make him go in for fives or racquets;
+or, to use an Eton illustration, to take a 'wet bob' who was a promising
+oarsman and might row in the school eight at Henley, and turn him into
+the playing-fields to become an inferior 'dry bob.'
+
+But the same arguments that apply to physical discipline apply also to
+mental discipline. In the class-room there is practically no latitude
+given to the boy at all. In many schools, it is true, there is the
+choice of a classical or a modern side; but the choice is the parents',
+not the boy's. The latter is always treated, in reference to his
+school-work, as a machine. There is simply the offer of a classical
+strait-waistcoat or a modern strait-waistcoat; and the boy is put into
+one or the other according to the fancy of a third person.
+
+Strait-waistcoats have long been discarded in lunatic asylums. It has
+been discovered by medical experts that anything like coercion is the
+worst possible treatment for the brain. Whilst our lunatics, however,
+are treated in this humane and rational spirit, the educational expert
+is busily occupied in destroying the delicate fabric of the schoolboy
+brain by the very methods that have been discontinued in the case of
+madmen.
+
+The school curriculum, or any other arbitrary course of study, is a
+mental strait-waistcoat. It has a more immoral and degenerating effect
+upon the mind because it is applied directly. If physical restraint acts
+perniciously upon the reasoning powers, a far greater degree of harm
+must be caused by direct mental restraint. Yet nobody, from Arnold and
+Thring down to the professional crammer of to-day, seems to have grasped
+this simple fact.
+
+Schoolmasters are like mothers. They imagine that because a boy happens
+to have survived their system of teaching the latter must necessarily be
+the one perfect method--just as the fond mother, whose infant has been
+enabled by means of a phenomenal digestion to outlive a particular food,
+believes that it is the only food upon which babies can possibly be
+brought up.
+
+When we come to survey impartially the effects of this system of
+education upon boys in general, it must surely be brought home to us
+that something is radically wrong somewhere. If a few manage to survive
+the treatment and remain the ten righteous individuals, what is to be
+said of the degeneration of the majority? It is surely absurd, with the
+anomalies and defects of the whole method of educating youth staring one
+in the face, to ascribe it to mere boy nature.
+
+The truth is that in boyhood the natural tendencies incline to push
+their way boisterously to the front. They are constantly trying to find
+an egress. But the parent and the pedagogue, in their blindness, can
+only see in this law of nature a wicked and perverse propensity that
+must be restrained at all hazards by a speedy application of the
+educational strait-waistcoat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE STRUGGLE OF THE EDUCATED
+
+
+So far we have chiefly discussed the effect produced upon the individual
+by a compulsory course of study. It has been seen that he suffers in a
+number of ways, through being subjected, from his earliest childhood, to
+a more or less inflexible method of training. All of these, however,
+have been directly attributable to his education. We may now consider,
+before pursuing the subject any further, certain disabilities that may
+be traced to the same cause, but which are brought about indirectly.
+
+It is bad enough, as most of us will have perceived, to compel a boy to
+learn certain things whether they are congenial to him or not. But it is
+preposterous that the same stock of knowledge should be forced upon all
+alike. This is, however, exactly what is being done in every educational
+establishment throughout the Empire, with the most disastrous
+consequences to the victims of the system.
+
+Let us turn once more to the map of life for an illustration.
+
+The average educated man begins to learn his alphabet at the age of four
+or five. During the following years he receives the necessary grounding
+to prepare him for the lower forms of a public school. At eleven, or
+thereabouts, he commences his school career. Throughout the whole of
+this period he is put through a course of study identical in every
+respect with that pursued by his schoolfellows. Every boy in the school
+is crammed with the same facts, and in the same way. The sixth-form boy
+is exactly like the rest of his class, exactly like the sixth-form boy
+of ten years ago, and probably exactly like the sixth-form boy of ten
+years hence. Not only does he possess precisely the same knowledge as
+his companions, hold the same opinions, and enjoy the same mental
+horizon, but he has acquired uniform tastes and habits. In other words,
+the school has stamped upon him a common individuality shared by all its
+pupils.
+
+After he has left school the same process is carried on at the
+university. Here he is crammed again with the same facts, the same
+rules, and the same ideas, borrowed from the same people, that are being
+dinned into scores of other young men who are working for their degree.
+Having gone conscientiously through this routine, he takes his degree
+with the rest.
+
+This aim being accomplished, his educational career is over. He has
+graduated; that is to say, he has obtained a certificate to the effect
+that he has acquired a certain regulation stock of knowledge.
+
+What happens next?
+
+The unhappy graduate suddenly makes the discovery that his university
+qualification is not the ready passport to employment that he had
+fondly imagined it to be. Unless he has a reasonable chance of a curacy
+and chooses to enter the Church, or can scrape together a few pupils to
+coach, or has the means to go on reading for the Bar or cramming for the
+public examinations, his prospects of immediate starvation are
+excessively favourable.
+
+It was remarked some years ago by a writer who had spent a great deal of
+time in investigating life at common lodging-houses in the poorer
+districts of the Metropolis, that a startling number of university men
+seemed to drift into them. Yet these are the men who are supposed to
+have qualified themselves most highly for the holding of good positions.
+In some way, therefore, it is clear that this academic training has
+disadvantages which serve to handicap its victims severely in practical
+life. It cannot be mere accident that those who, according to all
+educational tradition, are classed as the most fit for responsible
+employment necessitating good mental ability, actually labour under
+obvious disabilities in this connection.
+
+Nobody can urge that there is not enough work of a nature demanding high
+attainments to go round. Literature itself offers an enormous field for
+the exhibition of special talent; and there are many other walks in life
+where mental superiority is sadly needed, and which should therefore
+provide ample work and remuneration for those who show capability and
+resource. But in spite of all these openings some of our scholars are
+driven to eke out a miserable pauper's existence in the common
+lodging-house, or even in extreme cases to solicit parish relief.
+
+The explanation of this strange anomaly lies simply in the fact that the
+educational mill not only manufactures dummies, but makes them all
+exactly alike. In the higher types of schools and colleges there is
+generally a choice of three patterns--the classical dummy, the modern
+language dummy, and the scientific dummy. But each pattern is very like
+the other, for all the practical purposes of this life; that is to say,
+they are all equally useless and equally unfitted for the task of moving
+forward with the times.
+
+The result of fitting out everybody with a common stock of knowledge is
+to institute a disastrous form of intellectual competition. Thousands of
+young men are being equipped annually by our schools and universities
+for the performance of precisely the same functions. Intelligence
+brought wholesale to the market in this stereotyped form is in much the
+same unhappy condition as unskilled labour. There is a supply far in
+excess of the demand, and consequently employment cannot be found for
+all.
+
+Perhaps the profession of literature and journalism affords the aptest
+illustration of the utter folly and uselessness of producing these
+machine-made scholars, all filled chock-full with the same ideas, facts,
+figures, and dates. Here, as in reality everywhere else, there is need
+of originality, intellectual independence, insight, judgment, and
+imagination. Journalism wants ideas; facts are amply provided by the
+news agency and the reporter. The gates of literature are opened wide
+for striking and vigorous thought, trenchant criticism, and imaginative
+flights of fancy.
+
+What has the average academically-trained man to offer? He has an
+assortment of second-hand ideas borrowed from Plato and Socrates, from
+Ovid and Virgil and Horace; he can echo Voltaire, Goethe, Kant,
+Shakespeare, Dante; he can dish up Aristotle, Pythagoras, Bacon,
+Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday and Darwin. He can borrow
+illustrations from classical mythology; he knows the Dynasties of
+ancient Egypt; and he is able to furnish, without reference to history,
+the exact date upon which King John signed Magna Charta, and the precise
+number of battles fought in the Wars of the Roses.
+
+Such are the literary accomplishments of numberless university
+graduates, and it is small wonder that they often lead to the workhouse.
+The demand for the dressed-up ideas of the poets, philosophers, and
+scientists of a former generation is not great. Those who like their
+literature at second hand prefer snippets from the Newgate Calendar to
+the wise saws of Bacon; and they would rather have their blood stirred
+by quotations from 'The Charge of the Light Brigade,' or 'Pay, pay,
+pay,' than read a paraphrase of the combined wisdom of all the
+philosophers of the nineteenth century.
+
+The same argument holds good in relation to other professions and
+occupations. The university graduate has no practical accomplishments.
+He may be an ornamental, but he is certainly not _ipso facto_ a useful,
+member of society. The only thing for which he is pre-eminently fitted
+is to assist others, by means of extension lectures and cramming, to be
+his companions in misfortune. But this can hardly be designated a
+beneficial sphere of activity, and he is handicapped in all he
+undertakes by the fact that thousands of others possess the same
+educational equipment as himself.
+
+Why should every educated man be like the other? There is absolutely no
+reason for it. The similarity is purely artificial. Nature never
+intended all men to be cast in the same mould, and it is only the
+perversity of man himself that has brought the human race down to such a
+level. The stupidity of giving every scholar the same mental outfit is
+so self-evident as scarcely to need further comment. Even following the
+modern plan of stuffing minds instead of developing them, one would have
+thought that common sense would dictate the necessity of manufacturing
+as much variety as possible.
+
+The whole trend of evolution is to differentiate; and if natural laws
+were not completely disregarded by education systems, the absurdity of
+filling the world with two or three human species instead of a hundred
+thousand would never have been perpetrated. As long as this arbitrary
+interference with Nature is continued, educated men will not cease to be
+a drug in the market. Its immediate effect is not to endow the
+individual with special qualities, but to handicap him heavily for the
+real business of life.
+
+Competition amongst the 'well-educated' is not the result of
+over-population or of a too liberal supply of competent men. It is
+caused by uniformity of attainment; and until this is generally
+realized, one of the most pressing social problems cannot hope to find a
+solution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+WOMAN'S EMPIRE OVER MAN
+
+
+Men have always been reluctant to acknowledge the truth about woman's
+real position in the world. They keep up a beautiful kind of masculine
+myth about the mastery of the sterner sex and their mental superiority,
+and they talk of woman in a patronizing way as man's helpmate.
+
+There is no doubt--it is a physiological fact--that man possesses more
+brain-power or capacity than woman. But woman has, on the other hand, an
+enormous advantage in the use to which she has put her mental machinery
+from time immemorial. The truth is that women think out things for
+themselves a great deal more than does the average man. As, however,
+they concentrate their attention for the most part on what are called
+the minor interests of life, whilst men are occupied with bigger and
+more important things, it has come to be accepted that the mind of woman
+is inferior to the mind of man.
+
+In one sense this is true. Potentially, woman's mind has not the
+capacity of man's. One has only to look for female Shakespeares,
+Newtons, Bismarcks, Raphaels, and Beethovens, to verify the fact beyond
+dispute. But we are dealing here with existing circumstances, not with
+potentialities. Therefore I have no hesitation in saying that, as a
+general rule, women use what brain power they have to much better
+advantage than men; which amounts to a confession that woman, apart from
+intellectual specialization, is, on the average, man's mental superior.
+
+This is a sweeping statement to make, but it is made only in the
+interests of truth, and it admits of a great deal of plausible
+explanation.
+
+Man's mental training, as has been fully pointed out, consists almost
+entirely in pouring facts into a vacuum created by the careful
+elimination of original thought. Until recently, women have not been
+subjected to this agreeable process. For a very long time they were not
+educated at all, and when governesses first came into fashion in better
+class families, the idea was rather to endow girls with a few graceful
+accomplishments than to cram them with dates and other kinds of
+mechanical knowledge.
+
+This tradition is still kept up to a certain degree in the higher social
+circles; but there have also sprung up a large number of girls'
+colleges, in which all the bad points of masculine education are
+carefully copied. These colleges are frequented by girls of the upper
+and middle classes, chiefly the latter, and no doubt they are gradually
+working a revolution in feminine character. But heredity--especially
+when it is, within a generation or so, the heredity of long ages--is a
+very potent factor in the formation of both mind and body, and offers a
+steady resistance to innovation. The full effects, therefore, of this
+educational revolution in respect to womankind are not yet apparent.
+
+The net result of this is that the majority of women are still addicted
+to thought. Facts have not yet entirely taken the place of ideas in
+their minds, except in extreme cases which may be called exceptional,
+although it must be confessed that they are becoming every day less
+rare. They think, no doubt, for the most part about the commonplace
+incidents of their daily life, and possibly they are given too much to
+morbid introspection. But anything that serves to make a human being
+exercise the function for which his brain was originally intended should
+be regarded with thankfulness. It is a thousand times better for the
+development of the mind to speculate about the motives of acquaintances,
+or to philosophize on the shortcomings of the maid-of-all-work, than to
+babble off the dates of the Sovereigns from William the Conqueror, or to
+construe Horace's Odes without taking in a syllable of their sense.
+
+Women have thus formed a habit of reflection about trifles, which the
+more gifted amongst them extend to weightier topics. And it is in this
+way that they are able to gain an ascendancy over man that is the more
+potent because it is unobtrusive. The average woman sees things the
+subtleties of which escape man altogether, and she perceives them
+because her mind has been trained, by natural development, to
+observation.
+
+The average man, on the other hand, is the most unobservant creature
+under the sun. He rarely understands even what is going on under his
+nose. It is all very well to say that his superior mind is wrapt up in
+percentages, or absorbed in grand schemes for the regeneration of
+mankind. The plain truth is that he does not possess the faculty of
+applying his intelligence to everything within his range of observation.
+Evolution intended him to possess it; but education systems, which
+harbour very little respect for the laws of Nature, have found ready
+means to curb the propensity or to destroy it altogether.
+
+It is small matter for surprise, therefore, that woman should have
+succeeded in subjecting man to an empire as autocratic as it is, to all
+outward appearances, unsuspected. Some people maintain that this empire
+is gained solely by physical attraction; but this contention is
+disproved easily enough. All women do not possess the charm of beauty;
+yet there is scarcely a woman of any nationality, or belonging to any
+station in life, who does not exercise a more or less powerful influence
+over her menkind.
+
+Husbands are guided by their wives, even in matters of business or
+affecting public interests, far more than they are generally ready to
+acknowledge. Staying at a seaside hotel some time ago, I made the
+acquaintance of a hard-headed Lancashire merchant who had amassed a
+comfortable independence. In an outburst of confidence he told me one
+day that he had never taken a single important step in the conduct of
+his business without consulting his wife, and he also acknowledged that
+he had never had to regret asking her advice.
+
+The moral of this story is the more significant when it is recollected
+that in such a case the wife has not had the same opportunities as her
+husband of forming a correct judgment. The latter has the business
+details at his finger-ends; he is acquainted with the person or persons
+with whom the dealings are taking place; and he has his experience to
+fall back upon. But somehow or other the wife seems to grasp all the
+points, and to see more clearly into the motives of the person
+concerned. 'Why,' she will exclaim to her husband, 'can't you see that
+So-and-so is trying to bamboozle you?' And, the scales falling from the
+deluded husband's eyes, he suddenly makes the discovery that his wife
+thinks where his own powers of reflection are contented to remain
+dormant.
+
+The fact is, that the habit of thinking cannot be acquired through
+exercise in mental gymnastics. Philosophers, mathematicians, and men of
+science are notoriously up in the clouds, and incapable often to a
+remarkable degree of managing the affairs of everyday life with common
+sense. Yet these are the individuals who have been subjected to the
+highest form of what is called mental training. If fact-cramming and
+mental gymnastics are the best developers of the human mind, these men
+ought to be perfect models of intelligence. But will any candid-minded
+person call it the highest form of intellectual development to have a
+clear conception of the precession of the equinoxes, or to manufacture
+metaphysical conundrums, whilst remaining utterly incapable of applying
+common sense to human affairs that demand at least an equal amount of
+attention?
+
+It is clear that this type of mental training does not teach people to
+think at all, but has the contrary effect of restricting the
+intelligence to an altitude very far beyond the ordinary requirements of
+our social existence. Man may have a very broad horizon; but the broader
+it becomes, the further he seems to be transported from the capacity to
+exercise the normal functions of the brain. To designate this the proper
+development of the mind would be manifestly absurd; yet many people seem
+contented to regard it as such, and accept the anomaly without giving
+its obvious contradictoriness a second thought.
+
+Of course it is not argued that woman's mental training is, or has been,
+all that can be desired. It is, in her case, more the neglect to apply
+severe educational methods, than anything else, that has permitted the
+negative development of her thinking faculties; and this tends to
+demonstrate all the more conclusively that the real use of the brain is
+practically destroyed by conventional modes of instruction.
+
+Women, left to their own devices for countless generations, have
+acquired a faculty that all the education systems in the world have
+failed to pound into the mind of man. It is their superiority in this
+respect that has given them far-reaching empire over the opposite sex.
+That this should be generally appreciated is of the utmost importance,
+because the modern metamorphosis of woman, if rightly understood, is the
+best conceivable object-lesson in the evils brought about by the
+educational methods of the present day. It is not that the
+academically-trained woman threatens to push man out of his place in the
+world, but that she is herself in danger of losing the very weapon that
+has given her so large a share of power and influence.
+
+A great deal of nonsense has been talked and written about the
+spectacled Girton girl competing with men in knowledge, at the expense
+of forfeiting their admiration and thereby losing her vantage-ground.
+Spectacles do not enter into the matter at all. As has already been
+pointed out, physical attraction has nothing, or very little, to do with
+feminine wire-pulling.
+
+Women derive their real powers from a gift of trained observation, and
+from the subtlety conferred upon them by the capacity to apply their
+intelligence to the numerous small matters which go to make up the sum
+of human life. Their minds will no longer develop these powers when they
+are systematically subjected to a process of education which has
+invariably failed to evoke them in the opposite sex. And with the loss
+of them, woman is bound also to lose the empire which she has hitherto
+exercised over masculine nature.
+
+From this point of view alone, the education of women on the modern
+system is much to be deplored. There is no doubt that women in general
+have always exercised their predominant influence for the good of
+mankind. Striking exceptions might easily be adduced from history; but,
+on the whole, it must be acknowledged that woman has seldom abused her
+power. Therefore, anything that is calculated to undermine or destroy
+this favourable influence on human affairs cannot be regarded as
+otherwise than pernicious.
+
+The more the idea spreads that girls must be given the same educational
+equipment as boys, the more rapid will be the degeneration of woman. It
+is a well-known fact in the medical profession that weakly boys are
+often unable to withstand the strain of school cramming; therefore
+girls, with their more delicate organization, will suffer
+proportionately in a greater degree. Physical training, of course,
+obviates a great deal of this evil. But the same thing is bound to
+happen in the case of girls as has already been experienced where boys
+are concerned; that is to say, the most promising intellects will be
+sacrificed, partly through the ambition of the school authorities, whose
+principal anxiety is to see their pupils distinguish themselves in
+examinations, and partly owing to the fact that exceptional ability so
+often implies a nervous temperament and delicate physique.
+
+Women, it must be acknowledged, by no means use their faculties of
+thinking and observation to the best advantage. The conclusions at which
+they arrive are often far too definite, and have been formed in too
+great haste. So rapid is this operation of thought that it often becomes
+a mere intuition. Yet the remarkable accuracy of a woman's intuitions is
+evidence that there underlies them some intellectual process resting on
+a more solid basis than conjecture or guesswork.
+
+It is the crude and untutored stage of development of the thinking
+faculty in woman that causes it to work intuitively, instead of by the
+slower and sounder processes of logic. To neglect a faculty is by no
+means synonymous with developing it. Hence woman's powers of thought and
+observation are embryonic rather than matured. The work they perform is
+not a tithe of what would be accomplished by them under the auspices of
+judicious encouragement and skilled training. The faculty has neither
+been destroyed by over-cramming nor fostered by enlightened treatment.
+It has simply been allowed to lie more or less dormant, according to the
+natural environment of the individual.
+
+If man, with his superior brain capacity, were encouraged to cultivate
+the habits of observation at present restricted to woman, and to apply
+his intelligence to everything, instead of to a few selected objects,
+the ratio of the world's progress would be enormously increased. Who
+first started the notion that man is being manufactured into a superior
+article, and that woman cannot do better than submit herself with all
+haste to the same process, I do not know. At any rate, it is a
+disastrous doctrine, and the sooner the fallacy of it is perceived the
+more chance there will be of saving future generations of women from the
+blunder that is handicapping the masculine sex at the present moment.
+
+It would be a grand thing if educationists could be persuaded to open
+their eyes to the fact that women, having been providentially saved from
+school instruction for past generations, have been enabled to preserve
+mental faculties that no amount of cramming and corporal punishment has
+ever succeeded in awakening in man. They would then cease from their
+ignorant attempt to deprive woman of her intellectual gift, and possibly
+even do something towards securing man a little mental room for the
+installation of his own thinking faculty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+YOUTH AND CRIME
+
+
+We now come to the consideration of an aspect of the educational problem
+that involves questions of great difficulty and importance. The
+discussion has hitherto been limited to the lesser evils attributable to
+the forcing upon the masses of the people a useless and unsuitable kind
+of education. But there are far graver possibilities than the mere
+unfitting of large numbers of individuals for the occupations their
+natural propensities intended them to pursue.
+
+People are, as has been pointed out, driven by the stupidity of the
+teaching system into all kinds of uncongenial employment. The suffering
+and waste caused by this constant production of the unfit are
+incalculable. It is scarcely to be wondered at that some persons have
+formed the ingenious theory that this world is hell itself, and that we
+are now actually undergoing our punishment in purgatory. Certainly there
+is some ground for the supposition in the fact that the lives of so many
+of us seem to have been ordered in direct opposition to our individual
+tastes and wishes.
+
+This is bad enough. The question we have to face now is whether we have
+not to thank education systems for something a great deal worse. Mere
+unhappiness is not necessarily soul-destroying. But there is only too
+good reason to suppose that the evil effects of the mock education
+provided by the State do not stop at making its victims unhappy, but
+even go so far as to plunge a certain proportion of them into actual
+crime.
+
+At the outset it must be acknowledged that the allegation is very
+difficult to prove. No satisfactory evidence on the point is derivable
+from published statistics. It is quite possible to determine by means of
+the latter how many young persons between the ages of twelve and
+twenty-one have been convicted of indictable offences during the year.
+But everybody who is acquainted with criminology, or who is conversant
+with the compilation of statistical information, must be well aware of
+the futility of depending upon the apparently clear testimony of
+official figures.
+
+It would be extremely useful to find out whether juvenile offenders have
+increased or decreased since the institution of compulsory education.
+Statistics relating to this subject are procurable, but it is impossible
+to place any reliance upon them.
+
+In the first place, there is nothing to show the cause of any such
+increase or decrease in the offences committed by young persons. It may
+be due to a variety of circumstances, none of which can be accurately
+determined. For instance, it is a well-known fact that youthful
+offenders have of late years been treated by magistrates with
+ever-increasing leniency. Consequently, fewer convictions take place
+now, in regard to this class of offence, than was the case some years
+ago. The number of the convictions is, therefore, no guide at all as to
+the increasing or diminishing proportion of youthful criminals.
+
+Then there is the increased vigilance of the police, which leads to the
+more frequent detection of crime; whilst, as a set-off against this,
+there is the fact that education teaches the criminal, by assisting him
+to the reading of police-court reports and sensational storyettes, to be
+more wary.
+
+Besides these, there is the important consideration that by far the
+larger number of young persons guilty of offences of various kinds are
+not prosecuted at all. This is due to two causes: firstly, to the fact
+that in the majority of cases they are not found out; and secondly, that
+many people are reluctant to bring youthful offenders within the meshes
+of the criminal law, as a conviction, whether or not it be followed by
+punishment, generally spells ruin to the person who has been found
+guilty.
+
+There may be, and there probably are, many other and even more
+substantial reasons for discrediting statistics that are commonplaces to
+experts in crime. But those that have been cited, and which are at once
+suggested by common sense, fully suffice to show the impossibility of
+arriving at satisfactory conclusions on the basis of statistical tables
+published by the authorities.
+
+The Blue-book containing the latest judicial returns attempts to deal
+with this question of the increase or decrease of juvenile crime;
+figures being only available, however, from the year 1893. 'To answer
+this question,' it is stated, 'it is necessary to ascertain the
+proportion which youthful offenders bear to the total number of
+convicted persons. This is given in the following table, where it will
+be seen that the proportion of offenders under the age of twenty-one
+remains almost constant:
+
+'PROPORTION OF YOUTHFUL OFFENDERS CONVICTED OF INDICTABLE OFFENCES TO
+TOTAL NUMBER OF PERSONS CONVICTED.
+
++---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+
+|     Age.      |  1893.  |  1894.  |  1895.  |  1896.  |  1897.  |  1898.  |
++---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+
+|               |Per cent.|Per cent.|Per cent.|Per cent.|Per cent.|Per cent.|
+|   Under 12    |   4.6   |   4.9   |   4.6   |   5.6   |   5.6   |   5.6   |
+|12 and under 16|  15.0   |  15.2   |  13.4   |  14.5   |  14.0   |  14.5   |
+|16 and under 21|  21.2   |  22.0   |  21.8   |  19.7   |  19.5   |  20.2   |
+|               |         |         |         |         |         |         |
++---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+
+|Total under 21 |  40.8   |  42.1   |  39.8   |  39.8   |  39.1   |  40.3   |
++---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+
+
+'The general result is that the number of youthful offenders has
+diminished with the general diminution of crime, but that they still
+bear almost the same ratio as before to the total of criminals.'
+
+All this is, as has been pointed out, absolutely misleading. The number
+of persons convicted has nothing whatever to do with the increase or
+decrease of crime; and the proportion of youthful offenders to the total
+number of persons convicted is only calculated, in view of the great
+amount of clemency shown to young people both by magistrates and by the
+public, to give one a wholly false impression as to the prevalence of
+juvenile crime.
+
+It would be easy to take the criminal statistics of foreign countries,
+and to prove from them that the education of the masses there has
+brought about an overwhelming increase in the proportion of crimes and
+offences committed by young persons under the age of twenty-one.
+
+In Germany, Austria, France, Russia, Italy, Holland, and the United
+States juvenile crime has, according to statistical information, largely
+increased during the last quarter of a century. But, without making an
+exhaustive inquiry into the alterations that may have taken place in the
+law, the relative activity of the police, and a dozen other
+contingencies, it would not be honest to attempt to draw definite
+conclusions from these figures.
+
+One has, after all, in these matters to fall back upon logic and common
+sense. There is the solid fact that youthful criminals abound in spite
+of education systems, and although there is a considerable leakage in
+respect to school-attendance, it does not follow that juvenile offenders
+are drawn from this truant class to a disproportionate extent. It must
+be remembered, on the contrary, that a great amount of non-attendance at
+school is due to the employment of children--especially in rural
+districts, where the members of School Boards are often the very people
+who extract most profit from child labour.
+
+A prison chaplain of great experience, the Rev. J. W. Horsley, wrote, in
+his interesting work on 'Prisons and Prisoners': 'While covetousness is
+a factor of crime, the tools education places in the hands make crimes
+of greed more possible, and possible at an earlier age than in past
+generations. This week I got the Church of England Waifs and Strays
+Society to take under its care a child of ten, who had written, filled
+up, and cashed, a postal order that it might buy more lollipops.
+Increased knowledge, especially when not adequately accompanied by moral
+and religious education, will create new tastes, desires, and ambitions,
+that make for evil as well as for good. Let instruction abound, let
+education in its fullest sense more abound, but let us be aware of the
+increased power for evil as well as for good that they produce, and at
+any rate let us not imagine that education and crime cannot co-exist.
+Crime is varied, not abolished, not even most effectually decreased, by
+the sharpening of wits.'
+
+Speaking of intemperance in relation to crime, he states that:
+'Brain-workers provide the most hopeless cases of dipsomania. Increased
+brain-power--more brain-work; more brain-exhaustion--more nervous desire
+for a stimulant, more rapid succumbing to the alcoholic habit--these are
+the stages that can be noted everywhere among those who have had more
+"schooling" than their fathers. Australia consumes more alcohol per head
+than any nation. In Australia primary education is more universal than
+in England, and yet there criminals have increased out of all proportion
+to the population. Of much crime, of many forms of crime, it is
+irrefragably true that crime is condensed alcohol, and it is certainly
+not true that the absolutely or comparatively illiterate alone comprise
+those who swell these categories.'
+
+I have taken pains to ascertain the opinions of several of the chaplains
+attached to the great convict prisons, and they are practically
+unanimous in condemning the present system of education.
+
+'It is liable,' writes one of these experienced clergymen, 'to foster
+conceit, discontent, a disinclination to submit to discipline and
+authority, and a dangerous phase of ambition, which are fruitful sources
+of that kind of crime which is in these days most prevalent.... This
+superficial education causes, I think, self-deceit as well as
+self-conceit, and makes young people imagine that because, in addition
+to what they have learnt, they can present a good outward appearance,
+they are qualified to fill any kind of appointment with success.
+
+'I think, also,' he goes on to say, 'that it leads them in their desire
+to rise in the social scale to attempt by dishonest means to live at a
+higher rate than is justifiable, to gamble and speculate, in order to
+keep up a false position. I have come across those who have fallen where
+this has confessedly been the case, and who have lamented that such
+wrong ideas had been put into their heads. Young people now look upon
+many honourable and useful employments as beneath them, and there is a
+general rush for those which seem to offer a better social position.'
+
+The conventional belief in the efficacy of cramming boys with moral
+platitudes and all kinds of commonplace facts and theoretical knowledge
+is so ingrained that there is a natural reluctance to ascribe any evil
+effects to the process of education. I am contented, however, to let the
+facts speak for themselves. It cannot well be disputed that unsuitable
+education, or sham education, or whatever one may like to call it, is
+the direct cause of widespread dissatisfaction amongst the very classes
+from which the majority of criminals are recruited. Whilst vast numbers
+of people are constantly being unfitted for the commonest occupations of
+life, there must result an overcrowding of the callings which are
+considered suitable to the dignity of those who have eaten the unripe
+fruit of the elementary tree of knowledge.
+
+It is self-evident that the unsuitably educated have much greater
+incentive to wrong-doing than the merely illiterate, and it is also a
+corroborative fact that by far the greater proportion of criminals have
+been taught at least to read and write. Given two boys, one of whom had
+acquired a smattering of facts at school and had learnt the Catechism
+very perfectly by rote, whilst the other had merely been encouraged to
+apply a little common sense to manual labour, who would have any
+hesitation in pointing out the former as the more likely to fall into
+evil ways?
+
+Therein lies the supreme foolishness of modern methods of instruction.
+All the moral aphorisms in the world will not help a boy to be honest if
+he is at the same time unfitted for his station in life. People do not
+need moral instruction; they acquire all their morality in the school of
+life. It is impossible to teach boys and girls theoretically to be
+virtuous. All that can be done is to turn them into first-class
+hypocrites, ready to quote texts and to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine
+Articles, whilst they are busy breaking the Ten Commandments every day
+of the week.
+
+A surprising amount of virtue would come into the world of its own
+accord if a little more pains were taken to preserve for each individual
+the environment to which he is adapted by nature. This life has become
+such a mockery that people talk of heaven as a state in which every
+person will be free to do the things he likes best--as if that blissful
+condition were utterly unattainable here.
+
+Whilst such anomalies exist as those which curse the existence of the
+majority upon this earth, criminals will continue to be produced. And if
+we concede that these anomalies are directly or indirectly brought about
+by false and irrational methods of educating the youth of the country,
+we must also allow that education helps to manufacture criminals and to
+encourage crime.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+MENTAL BREAKDOWN
+
+
+It was frankly stated in the last chapter that there is no concrete
+evidence of a reliable nature as to the immoral effects of our education
+system. The inquirer has to depend rather upon the logic of
+philosophical speculation than upon the testimony of our available
+statistics, common sense being generally a far more truthful witness
+than figures that can be manipulated to mean almost anything.
+
+But when we come to inquire into the physical evils that are produced by
+cramming and injudiciously-applied instruction, it must be acknowledged
+that the evidence as to their existence rests upon a much more solid
+foundation. Clever brain specialists, who have made a lifelong study of
+mental diseases and the causes of mental breakdown, are in a position to
+state very definitely, from actual experience, whether or not the
+cramming system of modern education is productive of physical ill on a
+large scale.
+
+We all of us know, probably, of some isolated instances here and there
+where the severe strain of cramming for a competitive examination has
+resulted in loss of health and physical breakdown. Some are even aware
+of cases in which the unhappy victim of overwork has lost his reason
+altogether, and has been compelled to be placed under restraint. But it
+is only the physician who has made a special study of mental diseases
+that is in a position to form wide and accurate generalizations on the
+subject.
+
+In approaching this question, therefore, I have realized the importance
+of obtaining the opinions of experts who are alone qualified to express
+a well-balanced judgment upon a matter demanding knowledge and
+opportunities of observation of a very special nature. Accordingly, I
+have consulted some of the greatest brain specialists in this country,
+and the brief remarks that I am enabled to make on the subject of
+educational cramming and mental breakdown are chiefly based upon the
+valuable hints for which I am indebted to them.
+
+To take the case of healthy children first, it is satisfactory to learn
+upon high authority that they do not suffer much physical harm from the
+effects of overwork. What happens in their case is that the vigorous and
+healthy brain offers a sound resistance to the stuffing process, and
+speedily forgets what has been forced into it. From an educational point
+of view this is, of course, very disastrous; but as far as health
+considerations are concerned it affords a certain amount of consolation.
+
+This is to say, one must bear in mind, that modern methods of education
+are only salutary as long as they fail altogether to affect the
+intelligence. The moment they prove themselves to be efficacious they
+become an immediate source of danger.
+
+It follows from this fact that stupid children are as well protected
+against the evil effects of the education system as the healthy
+children. In fact, to a large extent the stupid children are the healthy
+ones by reason of their stupidity. It is, however, a great mistake to
+suppose that a stupid child necessarily implies one that is in any sense
+deficient mentally. The dull schoolboy often proves in after life to be
+the brilliant man. All that his dulness need be taken to signify is that
+his mind is not receptive to the subjects which are being forced upon
+it. Linnaeus was very stupid at Latin until an enlightened physician, who
+was aware of his passion for botanical study, suggested his reading
+Plinius; and although he may not have imbibed very accurate information
+about natural history from that philosopher, he succeeded in making
+immediate progress in the Latin language.
+
+There should be, under a rational system of education, no such thing as
+a stupid child. What is, after all, stupidity or dulness in a schoolboy?
+It simply means that the boy's faculties are undeveloped, and that no
+amount of fact-cramming has succeeded in developing them. The whole
+mischief lies, of course, in the fact that the school is not trying to
+develop the boy's own faculties at all, but merely to force him to adapt
+himself to its own curriculum and conventionality.
+
+The danger to the brain of the healthy or stupid child is not
+over-development but under-development. It is not they who suffer in the
+worst sense from the evil effects of over-education, but the gifted
+children, as they are called, or those whose quick, nervous intellects
+are most susceptible to the process of receiving any kind of
+instruction.
+
+It is the nervous boy or girl who generally makes the most promising
+pupil. A natural inclination to study leads children of this type to
+prefer the schoolroom to the playground. The boy who works hard to get
+to the top of his class, or to pass an examination, or to obtain a
+scholarship, is the one least given to games, and, in consequence, the
+weakest physically.
+
+These are the very children whom the teacher is most tempted to
+encourage to do more work than is good for them. The process of their
+mental development is so rapid that it needs no stimulation from
+outside. But that is not, unfortunately, the concern of the school
+authorities. The anxiety to produce scholars who will distinguish
+themselves in public examinations, and thereby advertise the school,
+invariably leads the schoolmaster to cram and stuff the brains of the
+brightest and most forward boys.
+
+There is special danger in over-working boys or girls of this type,
+because the brain is not strong enough to withstand the pressure. The
+result is never good, and in extreme cases it is as bad as it could
+possibly be. It follows, in fact, as a matter of course, that the finest
+and most sensitive intellects are the first to succumb to the pernicious
+effects of over-cramming the brain. There is a strain that can only be
+endured by second-rate minds, and it is not, therefore, the
+intellectually fittest who are encouraged to survive under the present
+system.
+
+What has been stated above refers rather to the higher class of schools
+and colleges, which prepare boys for examinations and academic
+distinctions of various kinds, than to the elementary schools to which
+the children of the poor are commandeered. In the latter establishments
+a special barbarity takes place which has been so widely discussed in
+Parliament and in the newspapers that I will do no more here than allude
+to it in passing.
+
+I refer to the forcing of instruction upon under-fed school-children.
+
+Apart from the gross inhumanity of the proceeding, there is the
+indisputable fact that the compulsory teaching of children whose bodies
+have not been properly nourished tends to weaken the intellect. If these
+children were subjected to a process of cramming such as is usual in the
+higher schools, their minds would undoubtedly break down altogether. As
+it is, the comparatively mild method of the elementary school does not
+effect anything worse in such cases than the prevention of the
+development of the mind, which is one degree better than complete
+breakdown or insanity.
+
+'The School Board system of cramming with smatterings,' wrote one of the
+greatest mental specialists in the world in reply to my inquiries,
+'instead of teaching their victims to think--even if only by teaching
+one subject well--is perhaps responsible for some positive mental
+breakdown; but probably the main harm of it is that it stifles and
+strangles proper mental development.' 'Undeveloped mentality,' he says
+in conclusion, 'is perhaps the principal fault of our educational system
+(so-called).'
+
+Another distinguished physician writes to me from a lunatic asylum:
+
+'We have had a few cases who have broken down, the results of working
+for scholarships; also we have had one or two cases of ladies who have
+broken down working for higher examinations. Dr. ---- and myself both
+feel certain that there is a good deal to be said against the increased
+pressure put upon young adolescents at schools. From my own experience I
+know that boys who were considered especially clever, and were high up
+in forms in the public school I was at, have most of them now dropped
+back, and are very mediocre. On the other hand, many who matured slowly
+have continued to advance. This is only an observation, and has many
+exceptions; but it is an observation that, as time passes, is more fully
+confirmed.'
+
+It is not necessary to add anything to these valuable expressions of
+opinion, proceeding from eminent men of wide experience, who are far
+more capable judges than the layman who has no scientific knowledge and
+a necessarily limited range of observation.
+
+Facts speak very eloquently for themselves. If brain specialists are
+continually coming across cases of mental breakdown resulting from
+cramming or over-education, it is quite clear that a system which is
+productive of such evils must be altogether defective in principle and
+wanting in common sense.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+EVIDENCE OF HISTORY
+
+
+After an exhaustive inquiry into the multifarious evils which must be
+laid at the door of education, it is refreshing to turn to history for
+illustrious examples of men who not only did not owe their greatness to
+academic training, but who actually owed it to what would nowadays be
+designated a neglected education.
+
+The chronicles of the past teem with instances of youths who have
+developed into brilliant men, in spite of the fact that they had either
+had no schooling at all, or had been considered the dunces of their
+class. It would, in fact, be far more difficult to supply illustrations
+of great men who have succeeded on account of their academic
+distinction, than to give examples of those who failed to distinguish
+themselves at school, but who nevertheless became famous afterwards as
+men of unusual talent.
+
+When Napoleon Bonaparte, at the age of fifteen, left the military
+college of Brienne, where he had been a pupil for five years and a half,
+the inspector of military schools gave him the following certificate:
+
+'M. de Buonaparte (Napoleon), born August 15, 1769; height 4 feet 10
+inches 10 lines; is in the fourth class; has a good constitution,
+excellent health, character obedient, upright, grateful, conduct very
+regular; has always been distinguished by his application to
+mathematics. He knows history and geography very passably. He is not
+well up in ornamental studies or in Latin, in which he is only in the
+fourth class. He will be an excellent sailor. He deserves to be passed
+on to the military school of Paris.'
+
+This was an optimistic description of the youthful Napoleon's
+accomplishments, for he was, as a matter of fact, so backward in Latin
+that his removal to Paris was opposed by the sub-principal of the
+college. According to the testimony of his schoolfellow and biographer,
+M. de Bourrienne, he exhibited backwardness in every branch of education
+except mathematics, for which he showed a distinct natural bent.
+
+The only professor at Brienne who took any notice of Napoleon was the
+mathematical master. The others thought him stupid because he had no
+taste for the study of languages, literature, and the various subjects
+that formed the curriculum of the establishment; and as there seemed no
+chance of his becoming a scholar, they took no interest in him.
+
+'His superior intelligence was, however, sufficiently perceptible,'
+writes M. de Bourrienne, 'even through the reserve under which it was
+veiled. If the monks to whom the superintendence of the establishment
+was confided had understood the organization of his mind, if they had
+engaged more able mathematical professors, or if we had had any
+incitement to the study of chemistry, natural philosophy, astronomy,
+etc., I am convinced that Bonaparte would have pursued these sciences
+with all the genius and spirit of investigation which he displayed in a
+career more brilliant, it is true, but less useful to mankind.
+Unfortunately, the monks did not perceive this, and were too poor to pay
+for good masters.... The often-repeated assertion of Bonaparte having
+received a _careful education_ at Brienne is therefore untrue.'
+
+Napoleon's military bent showed itself whilst he was at the College of
+Brienne. Heavy snow fell during one winter, and prevented him from
+taking the solitary walks that were his chief recreation. He therefore
+fell back upon the expedient of getting his school companions to dig
+trenches and build snow fortifications. 'This being done,' he said, 'we
+may divide ourselves into sections, form a siege, and I will undertake
+to direct the attacks.' In this way he organized a sham war that was
+carried on with great success for a fortnight.
+
+This brief sketch of Napoleon Bonaparte's schooldays has been given in
+order to show that the development of his genius owed nothing to
+academic training. Without being actually a dunce, he was backward in
+all the subjects except the one in which he took a vivid interest; and,
+doubtless, had he cared as little for mathematics as for Latin, he would
+have left Brienne with a reputation for profound stupidity.
+
+The school career of his great opponent, Wellington, was even less
+distinguished. Tradition has handed down to posterity no further details
+regarding his Eton days beyond the record of a fight with Sydney Smith's
+elder brother 'Bobus.' Alluding to him as a dull boy, Mr. Smiles
+states, in a footnote, in his book on 'Self-Help': 'A writer in the
+_Edinburgh Review_ (July, 1859) observes that "the Duke's talents seem
+never to have developed themselves until some active and practical field
+for their display was placed immediately before him. He was long
+described by his Spartan mother, who thought him a dunce, as only 'food
+for powder.' He gained no sort of distinction, either at Eton or at the
+French Military College of Angiers." It is not improbable that a
+competitive examination, at this day, might have excluded him from the
+army.'
+
+Lord Clive was a perfectly hopeless youth from the schoolmaster's point
+of view. He loathed work, and was always up to some prank or other. In
+the vain hope of inducing him to learn something, he was sent to four
+schools in succession; but, with a single exception, every master under
+whom he was placed declared him to be an incorrigible idler. The
+exception was Dr. Eaton of Lostock, who predicted a great career for
+Clive, provided an opportunity were afforded him for the exercise of his
+talents.
+
+At Market Drayton he amused himself by organizing a band of idle scamps,
+who went about threatening to smash the windows of tradespeople unless
+they paid a fine of apples or pence; and on one occasion he alarmed the
+inhabitants of the town by climbing a church steeple and seating himself
+upon a stone spout near the top.
+
+A man of the same stamp who received the scantiest education was George
+Washington. He is described as having been given a common-school
+education, with a little mathematical training, but no instruction
+whatever in ancient or modern languages.
+
+Christopher Columbus, another adventurous spirit, owed very little to
+his schooling. 'He soon evinced a strong passion for geographical
+knowledge,' writes Washington Irving in his interesting Life of the
+explorer, 'and an irresistible inclination for the sea.... His father,
+seeing the bent of his mind, endeavoured to give him an education
+suitable for maritime life. He sent him, therefore, to the university of
+Pavia, where he was instructed in geometry, geography, astronomy and
+navigation.... He remained but a short time at Pavia, barely sufficient
+to give him the rudiments of the necessary sciences; the thorough
+acquaintance with them which he displayed in after-life must have been
+the result of diligent self-schooling, and of casual hours of study
+amidst the cares and vicissitudes of a rugged and wandering life.'
+
+No better instance of the advantage of natural development and
+self-culture could be afforded than by the career of Dr. Livingstone.
+Working in a cotton factory as a boy of ten, he studied scientific works
+and books of travel, besides the classics, not only at night, but during
+the hours of labour.
+
+'Looking back now at that life of toil,' he wrote afterwards, 'I cannot
+but feel thankful that it formed such a material part of my early
+education; and, were it possible, I should like to begin life over again
+in the same lowly style, and to pass through the same hardy training.'
+
+Dr. Adam Clarke, the celebrated divine, scholar, and philanthropist, was
+a regular dunce in his early youth. It was only with difficulty, and an
+undue proportion of whacking, that the elements of the alphabet were
+driven into his head by an impatient teacher--a mode of instruction that
+probably caused him to remark, in after life, that 'many children, not
+naturally dull, have become so under the influence of the schoolmaster.'
+
+It is related of Dr. Clarke that when he reached the middle of 'As in
+praesenti,' in Lilly's Latin Grammar, he came to a dead stop and could
+get no further. His fellow-pupils, however, jeered him to such an extent
+that he determined to go on and conquer the difficulty. And this
+resolution seems to have helped him considerably, as, instead of the
+grammar being forced into him, he began to study and think for himself.
+
+Nevertheless, he always found great difficulty in learning anything at
+school, but was passionately devoted to reading imaginative books and
+stories of adventure, such as 'Jack the Giant-killer,' 'Arabian Nights,'
+'The Pilgrim's Progress,' 'Sir Francis Drake,' and a host of similar
+works. To these, in fact, and not to his painfully acquired school
+education, he was wont to attribute the formation of his literary taste.
+
+Disraeli's education was by no means thorough. There is no record of his
+having distinguished himself academically in the slightest degree. It is
+related of him, on the contrary, that he was such a duffer at classics
+as to be incapable of grasping the rule that 'ut' should be followed by
+the subjunctive mood. The following account of Disraeli's schooldays,
+given by one of his school-fellows, is quoted by Sir William Fraser:
+
+'I cannot say that Benjamin Disraeli at this period of his life
+exhibited any unusual zeal for classical studies; and I doubt whether
+his attainments in this direction, when he left the school for Mr.
+Cogan's at Walthamstow, reached higher than the usual grind in Livy and
+Caesar. But I well remember that he was the compiler and editor of a
+school newspaper, which made its appearance on Saturdays, when the
+gingerbread-seller was also to be seen, and that the right of perusal
+was estimated at the cost of a sheet of gingerbread, the money value of
+which was in those days the third of a penny.'
+
+Turning to literary men, we find an imposing array of dunces. I have not
+had time to examine into the school experiences of more than a limited
+number of great names. If the reader is anxious to pursue the
+investigation further, he will doubtless find that there is scarcely a
+famous man of letters who made his mark at school or university.
+
+The first person to teach Oliver Goldsmith his letters was a woman, who
+afterwards became village schoolmistress, named Elizabeth Delap. She did
+not form a very flattering opinion of her young pupil. 'Never was so
+dull a boy,' she was wont to declare; 'he seemed impenetrably stupid.'
+From this kind but undiscriminating teacher Oliver gravitated to the
+village school, where he learnt nothing. Thence he was sent to Elphin;
+and of this period of his school life Dr. Strean says: 'He was
+considered by his contemporaries and school-fellows, with whom I have
+often conversed on the subject, as a stupid heavy blockhead, little
+better than a fool, whom every one made fun of.'
+
+Goldsmith has himself, in his 'Inquiry into the Present State of Polite
+Learning,' recorded some very striking impressions as to the value of
+academic success. 'A lad whose passions are not strong enough in youth,'
+he writes, 'to mislead him from that path of science which his tutors,
+and not his inclination, have chalked out, by four or five years'
+perseverance, probably obtains every advantage and honour his college
+can bestow. I forget whether the simile has been used before, but I
+would compare the man whose youth has been thus passed in the
+tranquillity of dispassionate prudence to liquors that never ferment,
+and consequently continue always muddy. Passions may raise a commotion
+in the youthful breast, but they disturb only to refine it. However this
+be, mean talents are often rewarded in colleges with an easy
+subsistence.'
+
+Another 'impenetrable dunce,' according to the opinion of his tutor, an
+eminent Dublin scholar, was Richard Sheridan. He was afterwards sent to
+Harrow, where he earned for himself a great reputation for idleness. Dr.
+Parr, one of the under-masters, wrote to Sheridan's biographer the
+following expression of opinion:
+
+'There was little in his boyhood worth communication. He was inferior to
+many of his schoolfellows in the ordinary business of a school, and I do
+not remember any one instance in which he distinguished himself by
+Latin or English composition, in prose or verse.... He was at the
+uppermost part of the fifth form, but he never reached the sixth, and,
+if I mistake not, he had no opportunity of attending the most difficult
+and the most honourable of school business, when the Greek plays were
+taught--and it was the custom at Harrow to teach these at least every
+year. He went through his lessons in Horace and Virgil and Homer well
+enough for a time. But, in the absence of the upper master, Dr. Sumner,
+it once fell in my way to instruct the two upper forms, and upon calling
+up Dick Sheridan, I found him not only slovenly in construing, but
+unusually defective in his Greek grammar.... I ought to have told you
+that Richard, when a boy, was a great reader of English poetry; but his
+exercises afforded no proof of his proficiency.'
+
+The latter statement speaks volumes for a method of teaching which
+failed to evoke, even in such a master of English literature as Sheridan
+eventually proved himself to be, a proper development of his greatest
+talent. No doubt the exercises in which so little proficiency was shown
+were compulsorily executed against the grain, being of such a pedantic
+character that no sane schoolboy could possibly be found to evince the
+smallest interest in them.
+
+Dean Swift and Sir Walter Scott were both dull boys. The former says of
+himself that he was 'stopped of his degree for dulness and
+insufficiency.' Scott, in his autobiographical sketch, does not make
+himself out to have been the dunce that he really was supposed to be at
+school. If not bright at his lessons, however, he was certainly clever
+in other ways and capable of thinking for himself. An excellent
+illustration of this is contained in the story that though Scott, as a
+boy, used invariably to go to sleep in church in the course of the
+sermon, yet, when questioned about the latter afterwards, he was
+generally able to sketch out most of the points dwelt upon by the
+preacher--the explanation being, of course, that, given the text, he was
+able to follow the probable train of thought inspired by its wording.
+Summing up Scott's attainments, a biographer gives expression to the
+opinion that he was 'self-educated in every branch of knowledge he ever
+turned to account in the works of his genius.'
+
+Neither Burns nor Carlyle was a scholar. The former received a grounding
+in grammar, reading, and writing. He acquired a little French, but
+learnt no Latin at all. Whatever he knew he owed to the fact that he
+exercised his own taste for knowledge by choosing his own books and
+devouring only what appealed to his mind. Carlyle, like many another
+famous man of letters, had little Latin and less Greek. 'In the
+classical field,' he wrote, 'I am truly as nothing.' For mathematics he
+showed a certain amount of inclination, but even in that field did not
+succeed in carrying off any prizes. His own opinion of a conventional
+education is very tersely rendered by his exclamation: 'Academia! High
+School instructors of youth! Oh, ye unspeakable!'
+
+The poet Wordsworth was educated at the grammar school at Hawkshead. He
+always declared that the great merit of the school was the liberty
+allowed to the scholars. No attempt was made to cram or to produce model
+pupils. Within limits they appear, in fact, to have been allowed to read
+precisely what they pleased. In this way Wordsworth received in every
+sense of the term a liberal education; and when he went to Cambridge,
+'he enjoyed even more thoroughly than at Hawkshead whatever advantages
+might be derived from the neglect of his teachers.'
+
+The poet had a great contempt for academical training, and refused to go
+through the usual Cambridge course. He finally graduated as B.A. without
+honours, afterwards recording his indifference to academic distinction
+in the well-known lines:
+
+    Of College labours, of the Lecturer's room,
+    All studded round, as thick as chairs could stand,
+    With loyal students faithful to their books,
+    Half-and-half idlers, hardy recusants,
+    And honest dunces--of important days,
+    Examinations, when the man was weighed
+    As in a balance! Of excessive hopes,
+    Tremblings withal and commendable fears,
+    Small jealousies, and triumphs good or bad--
+    Let others that know more speak as they know.
+    Such glory was but little sought by me,
+    And little won.
+
+More forcibly expressed was Rousseau's derision of ordinary educational
+methods. Writing in his 'Confessions' about the school days of his
+cousin and himself, he says: 'We were sent together to Bossey, to board
+with the Protestant minister Lambercier, in order to learn, together
+with Latin, all the sorry trash which is included under the name of
+education.... M. Lambercier was a very intelligent person who, without
+neglecting our education, never imposed excessive tasks upon us. The
+fact that, in spite of my dislike to restraint, I have never recalled my
+hours of study with any feeling of disgust, and also that, even if I did
+not learn much from him, I learnt without difficulty what I did learn,
+and never forgot it, is sufficient proof that his system of instruction
+was a good one.'
+
+As far as the history of science is concerned, there is a long array of
+self-cultured men to whom most of the discoveries that have been made
+are due. In no other occupation is the faculty of thinking originally
+and independently more essential than in the pursuit of scientific
+knowledge, and it is significant that amongst famous scientists more
+instances are to be found of men who owe nothing to school instruction
+or academic training than in almost any other walk of life.
+
+In this connection mention has already been made of the famous botanist
+Linnaeus. The whole of his school life was one unremitting protest
+against the usual educational methods of endeavouring to force the mind
+away from its natural bent. Linnaeus detested metaphysics, Latin, Greek,
+and every subject except physics and mathematics, in which he usually
+outstripped his fellow-pupils. But his nose was kept to the grindstone
+until the authorities informed his father that he was not fit for a
+learned education, and recommended his being given some manual
+employment. Thus were twelve precious years of the life of one of the
+most gifted men of science, save for what he accomplished out of school
+hours, wasted to no purpose. It is not to be wondered at that he spoke
+of one of his masters as 'a passionate and morose man, better calculated
+for extinguishing a youth's talents than for improving them.'
+
+One of the greatest anatomists that ever lived, John Hunter, who
+numbered Dr. Jenner amongst his pupils, was scarcely educated at all for
+the first twenty years of his life. Mr. Smiles states that 'it was with
+difficulty that he acquired the arts of reading and writing.' Originally
+a carpenter, he became assistant to his brother, who was established in
+London as a surgeon. He acquired all his knowledge of anatomy in the
+dissecting-room, and owed everything he had learnt to his own hard work
+and habit of thinking things out for himself.
+
+'The brilliant Sir Humphry Davy,' says Mr. Smiles, 'was no cleverer than
+other boys. His teacher, Dr. Cardew, once said of him, "While he was
+with me I could not discern the faculties by which he was so much
+distinguished." Indeed, Davy himself in after life considered it
+fortunate that he had been left to "enjoy so much idleness" at school.'
+
+Newton was always at the bottom of his class, until he suddenly took it
+into his head to give a boy, whom he had already thrashed in another
+sense, an intellectual beating. 'It is very probable,' writes Sir David
+Brewster in his biography, 'that Newton's idleness arose from the
+occupation of his mind with subjects in which he felt a deeper
+interest.' Nobody could have penned a more incisive indictment against
+the imbecility of an education system that forces all boys, irrespective
+of their wishes or talents, into a fixed groove. It was Newton who, in
+answer to an inquiry as to how the principle of gravity was discovered,
+replied: 'By always thinking of it.'
+
+When Watt, as a boy, was engaged in investigating the condensation of
+steam, his aunt, who was sitting with him at the tea-table, exclaimed:
+
+'James, I never saw such an idle boy! Take a book or employ yourself
+usefully. For the last half hour you have not spoken a word, but taken
+off the lid of that kettle and put it on again, holding now a cup and
+now a silver spoon over the steam, watching how it rises from the spout,
+and counting the drops of water.'
+
+In this sympathetic way children are usually encouraged to think by
+their elders. Watt's faculties were developed entirely at home. He was
+sent to a public elementary school in Scotland; but, fortunately for
+science, he was so delicate that he was nearly always absent through
+indisposition. A visitor, who found the boy drawing lines and circles on
+the hearth with a piece of coloured chalk, once remonstrated with Mr.
+James Watt, senior, for allowing his son to waste his time at home. Watt
+had the good fortune, however, to possess an intelligent father, who
+encouraged the boy as far as it lay in his power.
+
+Left to his own devices, Watt not only contrived to make himself the
+foremost engineer of his time, but he also developed his talents in many
+other directions. Sir Walter Scott says of him that 'his talents and
+fancy overflowed on every subject.' And M. Arago, the French scientist,
+in his memoir of Watt, expresses the view that the latter, in spite of
+his excellent memory, 'might, nevertheless, not have peculiarly
+distinguished himself among the youthful prodigies of ordinary schools.
+He could never have learned his lessons like a parrot, for he
+experienced a necessity of carefully elaborating the intellectual
+elements presented to his attention, and Nature had peculiarly endowed
+him with the faculty of meditation.'
+
+This is only a roundabout way of saying that the conventional process of
+cramming would have destroyed the fine intellectual faculties possessed
+by Watt. But if in his case, why not in that of another? That is the
+strange thing about the light shed upon educational problems by cases
+like that of Watt, Newton, and other men of commanding genius. People
+only perceive in it a half-truth. They think that it is only in these
+exceptional instances that the mind is incapable of being developed by
+ordinary rough-and-ready methods.
+
+Upon what grounds is such an absurd deduction founded? It is true that
+individuals differ widely as to the capabilities of their mental
+machinery; but it does not follow that the intellectual fibre of one
+person is more delicate than that of another.
+
+The difference is not mental, but physical. It is because a boy is
+healthy, and not because his intellectual fibre is coarse, that he is
+better able to withstand the strain of an educational training than a
+weaker and more nervous boy.
+
+Until the discovery is made that all minds are sensitive, when they have
+been actually reached, people will go on ignorantly destroying the
+finer faculties under the impression that genius or talent is a very
+rare thing, and can always shift for itself.
+
+Yet, as I have attempted to show, the evidence of history points
+conclusively to the fact that the contrary is the case.
+
+Is it really supposed that the great names that have been handed down to
+posterity represent all the genius to which the world has given birth?
+
+The idea is preposterous.
+
+For every man of genius or talent who has been permitted to survive,
+education systems have killed a hundred.
+
+If it had not been for Dr. Rothmann, there would probably have been no
+Linnaeus to revolutionize the system of botanical classification. Had
+tyrannical parents and schoolmasters compelled Watt and Newton to give
+up mechanics and scientific study for a thorough cramming in Latin
+grammar and Greek roots, we might to-day be without a steam-engine or a
+theory of the law of gravitation. Even the genius of Napoleon and
+Wellington might easily have been crushed under the auspices of a modern
+competitive examination.
+
+Would stupid Oliver Goldsmith have written his immortal 'Vicar of
+Wakefield' and 'She Stoops to Conquer,' or would idle Sheridan have
+penned the exquisite comedies that have not to this day been approached
+by any subsequent writer, if their idleness and stupidity had been
+submitted to the test of an enforced academic training for classical or
+mathematical honours?
+
+Surely the evidence of history points to only one conclusion--namely,
+that all the genius in the world cannot survive the hopeless imbecility
+of educational methods, except by successfully dodging them through
+stupidity and idleness, whilst the faculties develop themselves at
+stolen intervals.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE APOTHEOSIS OF CRAM
+
+
+We have reached a point at which it is advisable to take a broad survey
+of the direction in which education systems are hurrying the world. Have
+these educational methods a definite objective, or is their sole purpose
+the production of scholars manufactured _en bloc_?
+
+These are important questions that need careful answering. Upon the face
+of it, there is no doubt that in this country, at least, educational
+establishments have, up to the present, aimed only at turning out
+scholars of certain intellectual types. The result of this process has
+been shown in the preceding pages to be sufficiently disastrous in its
+effects upon its victims. There are, in fact, few social evils which
+cannot be traced, directly or indirectly, to its agency.
+
+But as yet there has been no dominant motive-power, working invisibly
+towards a definite end, behind the educational machinery of the country.
+
+A general feeling has been fomented of late, however, that all
+education, from the lowest step to the highest, ought to be co-ordinated
+and organized into a single piece of State-directed machinery. The
+danger of this can only be appreciated by an examination of the effects
+already produced by such a system in other countries.
+
+Germany offers in this connection the best possible example. The
+interference of the State in educational matters has there been brought
+to perfection. Absolute control is exercised by the Government in
+everything appertaining to the instruction of youth all over Germany.
+The Emperor has become so autocratic in the exercise of this control in
+the kingdom of Prussia, that he talks openly about manufacturing this or
+that kind of educational article exactly in the manner in which a
+manufacturer would discuss putting some commodity upon the market.
+
+There is not the slightest attempt on the part of the Prussian
+Government to disguise the political uses to which their supreme
+authority in educational matters is put. One of the first acts of the
+Emperor William II., on succeeding to the throne, was to issue the most
+plain-spoken instructions to the Government of Prussia in reference to
+State interference with the schools for political purposes.
+
+'For a long time,' it was declared in the royal decree,[A] 'I have been
+occupied with the thought how to make the school useful for the purpose
+of counteracting the spread of socialistic and communistic ideas.... The
+history of modern times down to the present day must be introduced more
+than hitherto into the curriculum, and the pupils must be shown that
+the executive power of the State alone can protect for each individual
+his family, his freedom, and his rights.'
+
+    [A] For information on this and many other points connected with
+    the subject of education in Prussia, I am indebted to Mr. Michael
+    E. Sadler's special report to the Board of Education on 'Problems
+    in Prussian Secondary Education for Boys.'
+
+Later on follows the recommendation that, 'by striking references to
+actual facts, it should be made clear even to young people that a
+well-ordered constitution under secure monarchical rule is the
+indispensable condition for the protection and welfare of each
+individual, both as a citizen and as a worker; that, on the other hand,
+the doctrines of social democracy are, in point of fact, infeasible; and
+that, if they were put into practice, the liberty of each individual
+would be subjected to intolerable restraint, even within the very circle
+of the home. The ideas of the Socialists are sufficiently defined
+through their own writings for it to be possible to depict them in a way
+which will shock the feelings and the practical good-sense even of the
+young.'
+
+The danger of this direct State control is obvious. It renders all
+liberty of thought absolutely impossible. Politics, religion, social
+views--all are systematically worked into the curriculum for the object
+of stifling independent ideas, criticisms, and whatever else may be of
+value to the interests of the community at large, although possibly
+highly inconvenient to the established order.
+
+To cram the youth of the nation after this fashion with all the facts
+and fancies that may happen to suit the weaknesses of the national
+constitution, is exactly the way in which to bring about the decay of
+both Government and country. Merely from a political standpoint,
+therefore, nothing could be more disastrous to the State than to make
+use of its power of educational control in order to stifle opposition
+and independent criticism.
+
+It is equally clear that, wherever the Government possesses this power,
+it will use it as far as is practicable for the purpose of
+self-preservation. Almost for a century the Prussian authorities have
+been getting the control of their national schools more and more into
+their own hands. They have now succeeded in bringing the application of
+the theory of State interference to the high-water mark of
+practicability. From the rudiments of the alphabet to the history of
+economics, everything in the Prussian curriculum may be suspected of
+serving some political purpose. The schoolboy is regarded by the
+authorities as a mere pawn, to be moved on the national board in strict
+accordance with the political necessities of the hour.
+
+For some years past, the attention of Prussia and of the whole German
+Empire has been concentrated upon the commercial rivalry of the
+different nations of the world. The chief, if not the sole, educational
+aim has been to produce a percentage-calculating machine on a wholesale
+plan, equipped with certain devices for the successful carrying on of
+trade. The German authorities became impregnated with the belief that
+commercial supremacy could best be attained by organizing the whole
+nation into a uniform body of workers trained to co-operation.
+Everything of late years has been subordinated to this design.
+
+The commercial success of the scheme has been notorious. German
+manufacturers have been gaining ground in all parts of the world. The
+consular reports at the Foreign Office are filled with pessimistic
+warnings about the decline of British trade at various points where it
+was once supreme, and with significant statistics that show the rapid
+advance of German commercial enterprise.
+
+But it does not follow, because Germany seems to have shot ahead of us
+by leaps and bounds of late years, that she has adopted sound means to
+accomplish this end. On the contrary, if the expedients by which this
+commercial supremacy has been attained are an exaggeration of the worst
+evils of education systems, then Germany has started upon a downward
+path which must eventually lead her to the brink of ruin.
+
+And this is precisely the case. Cramming has been brought throughout
+Germany to the level of a fine art. It is done, I must confess--for I
+was myself subjected to the process for some years--more completely and
+effectively than in this country. That is to say, the pupil is not
+crammed in such an idiotic fashion that he forgets all that has been
+stuffed into him immediately he has left school. The drilling, however
+wrong it may be in principle, is thorough enough, in all conscience. It
+may be, as it is elsewhere, the pestle and mortar system. But at least
+the pestle is applied consistently, and each ingredient is perfectly
+mixed before the next component is introduced.
+
+If, therefore, the object of education be to produce an article of a
+certain type or consistency, then the Prussian school stands far in
+advance of our own cramming institutions. It may well be taken in that
+case as a model for us to copy.
+
+People should, however, ask themselves these questions: Is it
+international commercial rivalry that produces the necessity of a State
+system of education to equip the nation for the struggle? Or is it the
+State system of education, with its organized attempt to manufacture a
+race of traders, which has artificially created the state of commercial
+warfare into which we are rapidly drifting?
+
+The answer seems to me to be plain enough.
+
+The individuality of individuals is rapidly disappearing throughout that
+part of the world which has chosen to subject itself to uniform
+education systems. One Englishman is much like another, in the same way
+that Russians, or Germans, or Frenchmen resemble each other. In other
+words, the only individuality which education is leaving us is that of
+nationality; and the reason of this is because the manners, the customs,
+and the school systems of various countries still differ to a certain
+extent.
+
+Instead, therefore, of the individual competing against the individual,
+we are rapidly approaching the point where the whole strength and
+resources of each nation will be employed to co-operate against the rest
+of the world. And this is no mere natural outcome of evolution. Germany,
+with her extraordinary cuteness and foresight, invented the game for her
+own benefit a generation or two ago. She has spent the best part of half
+a century equipping herself, hand over fist, for this kind of commercial
+contest.
+
+But what is she sacrificing in order to obtain this triumph of the
+trader?
+
+There cannot be a question that she is deliberately and systematically
+throwing away the most precious of all human possessions--the character
+of the individual. At the Berlin Conference on Secondary Education, held
+in 1890, Dr. Virchow observed: 'I regret that I cannot bear my testimony
+to our having made progress in forming the character of pupils in our
+schools. When I look back over the forty years during which I have been
+Professor and Examiner--a period during which I have been brought in
+contact not only with physicians and scientific investigators, but also
+with many other types of men--I cannot say that I have the impression
+that we have made material advances in training up men with strength of
+character. On the contrary, I fear that we are on a downward path. The
+number of "characters" becomes smaller. And this is connected with the
+shrinkage in private and individual work done during a lad's school
+life. For it is only by means of independent work that the pupil learns
+to hold his own against external difficulties, and to find in his own
+strength, in his own nature, in his own being, the means of resisting
+such difficulties and of prevailing over them.'
+
+The inevitable result of this sacrifice of individuality must be the
+intellectual decay of the nation, or at least its degeneration into a
+state of hopeless mediocrity. Unless, therefore, Germany can persuade
+other countries to adopt similar tactics, and to meet her on the plane
+where she has already obtained the start of a generation, she must come
+hopelessly to grief in the future.
+
+Unfortunately, there seems every indication that the statesmen who lead
+rival nations are only too ready to follow Germany's blind lead. In this
+country it is only the blessed ignorance of the people which is holding
+back those who are anxious to commit the folly that has put pounds,
+shillings, and pence into German pockets, at the cost of taking
+originality and character out of German heads.
+
+This educational suicide, it must also be remembered, can only be
+committed without serious social disturbance in a despotically-governed
+country like the German Empire. In England, with our system of party
+government, a complete measure of State control in educational matters
+would create a political pandemonium that would be little short of
+appalling.
+
+The party struggles of the future would, if this Prussian system were
+transplanted here, centre round educational control. The schools would
+no longer be regarded as establishments for the instruction of youth;
+they would be looked upon simply as the nursery of the future voter. A
+Conservative Government would cram everything into the curriculum
+calculated to stifle inconveniently progressive ideas, whilst a Radical
+Government would try to banish from the schools all established beliefs
+and conventions.
+
+Between these opposing stools the manufactured scholar would fall
+lamentably to the ground. He would be neither fish, flesh, nor fowl.
+There would be a perpetual chopping and changing in the methods of his
+education, from which he would not even derive the benefit, so
+gratefully acknowledged by Wordsworth, of being neglected by his
+teachers.
+
+To talk of beating Germany at her own game is, therefore, the height of
+absurdity. Nothing could result from such an endeavour but ruin to the
+country. Under our party system it is obvious that it could not be done
+with the remotest chance of success. And even if it were possible to
+obtain steady uniform State interference, working always towards a
+specific end, German methods would only be adopted at the expense of
+increasing the pressure of cramming _en bloc_, and thereby multiplying
+the evils which have been but faintly depicted in the foregoing pages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE GREAT FALLACY
+
+
+That the world is badly ordered for humanity is a self-evident truth of
+which the observant scarcely need reminding. It is equally obvious, from
+the exquisite order and symmetry of animal and vegetable life, that
+Providence is not to blame for the colossal mess into which civilization
+has managed to lead the majority of mankind.
+
+Man is himself responsible for the present state of human affairs; and
+although great things have been undeniably accomplished during the
+progress of the nations, the magnificent achievements of exceptional
+individuals pale beside the stupendous blundering of the many.
+
+It must surely be clear to everybody that there has been some evil
+influence at work to arrest the fair promise and development of the
+human race. The splendid march of intellectual progress from the dark
+ages to the brilliant dawn of the nineteenth century, with its
+glittering array of master minds and its titanic roll of genius, has
+been suddenly brought to a dead halt. Here and there, during the past
+generation, great figures have struggled up on to the world's stage and
+grappled with the ebb-tide. But the majestic stream of mediocrity has
+swept away their dykes, and obliterated their landmarks with its
+increasing volume.
+
+The remarkable fact can hardly have escaped attention that the more
+humanity attempts to equip itself for the serious business of life, by
+forcing itself into an educational strait-waistcoat, the more rapid
+becomes the disappearance of character and genius, and even of ordinary
+talent. Everybody is getting ground down to a level. It is scarcely
+possible to point to a single civilized man and say: 'There is somebody
+in whom every faculty has been developed and natural talent perfected to
+its utmost capability.' The most that can be said of the individual is:
+'There goes a Cambridge man or a grammar-school man, and when you have
+knocked all the nonsense out of him you'll find he's not a bad fellow at
+bottom.'
+
+We are not what we have made ourselves, but what we have chosen to allow
+others to make us. Whatever may once have been the nursery of the human
+race, it is now to a great extent the school. Some part--it generally is
+the best part--of education takes place outside the class-room; but it
+must be remembered that the atmosphere of home is generally impregnated
+with the conventional traditions of the school and of the university.
+
+The evil influence that is so obviously undermining social and national
+life must, therefore, first be sought in the principles upon which
+education systems have been founded.
+
+Nothing is more astonishing than to reflect upon the unintelligent
+grounds on which people base their adherence to the principles of modern
+education. They are unable, in the first place, to get over the fact
+that their forefathers were brought up in the same fashion before them.
+It is a sheer impossibility for most people to question anything that
+has been going on for any length of time unchecked.
+
+The undisputed possession of a custom for so many years converts it into
+the legal property of the nation, whence it derives a sacred character,
+and nobody dreams of meddling with it. Any abuses it may bring in its
+train are then conveniently ascribed to the perversity of Providence.
+The cherished convention is never questioned. That is the remarkable
+thing about it. People can be brought to understand, by means of a
+flourish of dazzling prospectuses and newspaper advertisements, that a
+bicycle is an improvement on a bone-shaker, or that pneumatic tyres are
+more comfortable on rough roads than iron-rimmed wheels. But that
+appears to be the set limit of their comprehension.
+
+They are capable of being made to grasp, after nearly exhausting the
+resources of a wealthy syndicate, something that obviously affects their
+material comfort. But progress in ideas, or anything in the shape of
+moral revolution, has to undergo a thousand-fold more tortuous process
+before it can be made to filter through a convention. The academic
+product is, it must be remembered, a bundle of conventions. If the
+article has been properly manufactured, and bears the hall-mark of the
+maker and the stamp of the country of its origin, there is nothing else
+there for the truth to filter into. It simply drops through and
+vapourizes without disturbing anything.
+
+Conventionality is therefore an insuperable obstacle, as far as the
+majority of minds are concerned, to the discovery that the established
+principles of education are absolutely false. These principles will
+never be questioned. It is good enough for the average man that his
+fellow-creatures have been contented with them since time immemorial,
+and that they are diligently practised in the schools and colleges whose
+names have been household words for generations past.
+
+Next to this antiquated conservatism of the least intelligent and most
+dispiriting type, comes the false shame that the majority of people
+exhibit when caught displaying ignorance of any of the facts which
+cramming systems have pronounced to be indispensable to a general
+education. Probably more real culture is nipped in the bud by the
+ridiculous assumption that everybody must be a walking encyclopaedia,
+than by all the Philistine conventions and stupidities put together.
+
+In the course of a recent conversation with an exceptionally brilliant
+woman of my acquaintance, it transpired that she believed Winchester and
+Cambridge to be in the same county. This lack of geographical knowledge
+did not appear, however, to have impaired her intellectual faculties.
+There are many persons who can accurately locate any town in England,
+and yet are vastly inferior in mental capacity to the lady who thought
+that Cambridge was in Hampshire.
+
+Why should an individual know more than it is useful and convenient for
+him to know? For the student of foreign politics it is essential to be
+aware of the geographical difference between Tokio and Peking; but of
+what earthly use would this knowledge be to a man who devoted the whole
+of his life to inquiring into the domestic routine of the extinct dodo,
+or to the improvement of agriculture by the application of scientific
+manures?
+
+Life is short, and it is only possible within the limits of the brief
+span allotted to us upon earth to acquire a certain number of facts. It
+is monstrously absurd to sacrifice our best years in stuffing so many
+facts into the brain, in order to avoid being laughed at by a few
+thin-minded pedants as an ignoramus. Some consolation, at least, might
+surely be derived from the reflection that many of the greatest geniuses
+whom the world has produced were profoundly ignorant as to ninety per
+cent. of the things which are considered to be indispensable knowledge
+at the present day.
+
+Nobody can hope to read all the books that are popularly supposed to
+have been digested by the well-educated man. It would be impossible to
+get through a tithe of them. Yet how many people there are who will
+sooner tell a deliberate lie, than acknowledge having omitted to read
+some classic that happens to be mentioned in the course of conversation!
+And this is simply due to the infatuated belief that culture consists in
+stuffing one's self with the ideas of other people. A man whose brain
+was teeming with his own thoughts and creations, but who had neglected
+to stock it with the hundred thousand conventional facts culled from the
+hundred best books selected for him by other people, would be looked
+upon as an uneducated boor by cultured pedants of the conventional type.
+
+It will be seen, therefore, that this false shame, inspired by an
+unwholesome terror of public ridicule, plays a very important part in
+tying people to the apron-strings of education, and warping their
+judgment.
+
+But there is also a third factor which must be taken seriously into
+account. This is the widespread credulousness not only as to the
+efficacy, but as to the indispensability, of the ordinary methods of
+instruction as mental training. People have actually come to believe
+that no one can think without being taught to do so by means of all
+kinds of mathematical and classical gymnastics.
+
+Whence comes this monstrous notion I do not pretend to be capable of
+explaining--I merely note its universal existence. Probably no doctrine
+is more deeply ingrained in the mind of the average person. There does
+not seem to be any logic or sense in it; but somebody with a huge sense
+of humour must have once started the craze--much in the way that a
+practical joker will stare intently at nothing in a London street until
+he has collected a large and inquisitive crowd, and will then steal
+quietly away, leaving everybody looking vacuously at the same spot.
+
+In the whole history of education there is no greater absurdity than the
+notion that a boy can be taught to think by training his mind backwards
+and forwards in the conjugation of irregular verbs and the vagaries of
+Latin or Greek inflections. Exercises of this ingeniously ridiculous
+kind only serve to empty the brain of ideas, and to make room for the
+reception of facts crammed in on the wholesale system. It is an accepted
+fact, however, that the brain, in order to pursue its normal functions,
+must first be subjected to a course of training in abstract subjects as
+far removed as possible from all human interest; that common sense, in
+other words, is a product of Greek roots and algebraical formulae--not of
+the natural application of the thinking faculties to the ordinary
+circumstances of everyday life.
+
+The hopeless imbecility of this tenet of faith is only equalled by the
+depth to which it has taken root in the popular mind. The wonderful
+thing is that the total failure of the plan has not long ago convinced
+everybody of its uselessness. But that is at once the mischief and the
+charm of the convention: no amount of practical demonstration will
+prejudice anybody against it.
+
+In this way the great fallacy of education has been allowed to grow up
+and to spread its false and obnoxious principles like a network over the
+whole civilized world. With all the baneful effects produced by these
+fallacious dogmas staring them in the face, people do not seem to have
+been capable of tumbling to the fact that the origin of the social evils
+which surround them lies in the very calf of gold that they and their
+forefathers have set up and worshipped.
+
+Even the reformers of education appear to have deceived themselves.
+Many of them--Arnold and Thring conspicuous amongst their number--have
+tried to abolish this abuse or to remedy that defect; but not one has
+gone to the root of the evil, and has boldly stated that the whole
+system of education is based upon totally erroneous principles--designed,
+not to encourage progress and generate ideas, but to stifle development,
+and to place an insurmountable obstacle in the path of the evolution of
+humanity.
+
+The world has acquiesced in the deceit, and so the great fallacy has
+grown up unchecked, and, like a rolling stone, gathered moss from
+generation to generation, until its hideous proportions seem to have
+embraced the universe, and to have shut out every particle of light from
+the vision of unhappy, convention-haunted mankind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+REAL EDUCATION
+
+
+There is no such thing in existence as a system of genuine education. A
+large number of institutions exist, as we have seen, for the purpose of
+manufacturing and cramming, after an approved plan, the youth of the
+upper and middle classes, and there is a well-organized system of sham
+education spread throughout the country under the title of 'public
+elementary schools.' That is the sum of modern educational effort.
+
+The word 'education,' when used in the sense that is commonly applied to
+it, could not be satisfactorily and adequately defined in less than a
+post octavo pamphlet. It signifies an enormous number of things, from
+pot-hooks to trigonometry. It means history, geography, physics,
+chemistry, natural history, mineralogy, Latin, Greek, French,
+arithmetic, algebra, Euclid, and goodness knows how many more things,
+jammed in at so much a pound. It means taking a child, shaking
+everything out of its head, and then stuffing every nook and corner with
+facts it will never be able to remember, and with dates for which it
+cannot have any use. It means risking the mental shipwreck of the clever
+child, and making the stupid more dense. And it means popping the
+individual into a mould, and dishing him up as a dummy.
+
+What it does not mean, is developing the faculties of each individual.
+
+There is, in fact, a wide difference between what education is and what
+it should be. If every school and college throughout the country were
+closed to-morrow, it would probably effect some negative good within an
+appreciable measure of time, and it would certainly abolish much
+positive harm that is being unceasingly produced by the present methods
+of instruction. If no effort be made to develop the faculties of each
+individual, then it is better to leave them alone to develop on their
+own account. But nothing can be more pernicious than to take the youth
+of the nation wholesale, and to destroy most of the good that is latent
+in them, in order to manufacture them into something which Nature never
+intended them to be.
+
+This is not education, but fabrication. It is destruction, not
+development. Real education would consist in assisting every individual
+to develop the faculties with which Nature had endowed him, and to train
+to their highest capacity any special talents that might reveal
+themselves during the process. Above all things, real education would
+encourage the utilization of the brain for purposes of thought and
+reflection, instead of trying to make it a warehouse for storing
+van-loads of useless knowledge.
+
+It is absurd to assume that this simple educational aim is beyond the
+reach of humanity. That its introduction into the practical affairs of
+life would cause a stupendous revolution cannot be denied. But it does
+not follow, on that account, that it should be conveniently consigned,
+like many another pressing reform, to the pigeon-hole of the impossible.
+
+The main thing that is required to carry out the true principle of
+education is more individual common sense and less State interference.
+The mischievous enactment that children should commence any process of
+instruction at the tender age of five should be at once struck off the
+statute-book. No doubt something would have to be done to remove young
+children of the poorest class, in large towns at least, from the
+influence of sordid homes for a certain period of the day. It does not
+follow, however, that they should be subjected to the routine of an
+elementary school and crammed with superficial and unsuitable knowledge.
+
+Children want room to think; their minds have to grow up as well as
+their bodies. Mental nourishment is quite as necessary as physical
+nourishment; but it is nonsensical to apply them both in the same
+fashion. The mind has to be fed in a totally different manner to the
+body. The former is a delicate operation, that requires far more care
+and common sense than is necessary for the boiling of milk or the
+preparation of an infant food.
+
+The child's mind is not a blank, upon which anything may be written at
+will; it is scored invisibly with heredity and individual tendencies.
+The function of the parent is to see that nothing is done to destroy
+this delicate fabric, and to watch carefully for revelations of natural
+bent and character, in order to encourage and develop them.
+
+Anything in the shape of actual teaching or instruction ought to be
+rigorously avoided. Facts should be regarded as poisons, to be used
+sparingly and with discrimination. Every time that a fact is imparted an
+idea is driven out. That should be carefully borne in mind. The
+operation of the simplest fact upon the intelligence is highly complex.
+It is not only a thing to imprint upon the memory, but it is also a
+means of diverting thought into the channels of the commonplace. Every
+fact closes up an avenue of the imagination.
+
+To take an illustration, let us suppose someone to impart to a little
+child the information that it is a physiological impossibility for
+angels to have wings as well as arms. This prosaic piece of intelligence
+would, in one moment, annihilate most of the romance of childhood. It
+would be a blow from which the imagination might never recover. The
+child would, by a rapid process of thought, lose all faith in fairyland,
+and in the thousand and one fancies of the youthful brain that are the
+mainspring of the development of the imagination.
+
+Why is it that ninety-nine persons out of a hundred lose this faculty in
+the earliest period of their childhood? It is simply because their
+bringing-up has consisted in a persistent inoculation with the material
+facts of life, and a correspondingly persistent elimination of all
+imaginative ideas. 'Don't let the children believe such rubbish!' is a
+constant ejaculation of the mechanical-minded person who does not
+permit himself to suffer any illusions, and who has long since 'done
+with romance and all that kind of twaddle.'
+
+At any cost the imagination of the child should be encouraged and
+developed. It is the richest vein in the whole mental machinery of man,
+the faculty within which genius most frequently lurks, and where it can
+be most easily and permanently destroyed. Grown-up people should
+remember that an indiscreet answer to a childish question, or a snub
+administered to an inquiring mind, is often sufficient to check thought.
+It should be mainly the care of the parent to encourage the imagination
+in young children, recollecting that up to a certain age its development
+depends upon all the absurdities and fantastic notions of childhood
+which the average adult is so fond of repressing.
+
+By the exercise of prudence and some show of sympathy, it would then be
+possible to bring a child up to the age of seven or eight without
+damaging its mind or destroying its faculties. From that point onwards
+the child's education ought to depend upon the individual himself. There
+should be no such thing as instruction, in the sense which implies the
+cramming of the brain with information, or such mental gymnastics as
+conjugating irregular verbs and hunting for the least common multiple.
+
+The position of teacher and pupil would have to be practically reversed.
+The pupil would lead, and the teacher follow. In fact, the latter should
+become an adviser rather than instructor, the child selecting those
+studies, or those arts or crafts, which are to be made the principal
+objective of its education, whilst to the mentor would fall the role of
+encouraging and assisting the course of study or practice at a morally
+safe distance.
+
+Boys and girls would then not learn, but investigate. The process of
+learning should be got rid of altogether, being a clumsy, dronish way of
+acquiring knowledge, and one that tends to keep the brain in a perpetual
+state of dependence.
+
+Ignorance, one ought to remember, is a valuable incentive to
+investigation. Young people should be left as much as possible to find
+things out for themselves. Education should resemble a person groping
+forward in the dark; and only so much light ought to be let in upon the
+process as seems desirable in each individual case. In that way, at
+least, the pupil would learn to think for himself; and even if little
+more were accomplished than this, it would be of ten thousand times
+greater value to the individual, and to the community at large, than the
+acquisition of a large stock of facts at the price of losing all power
+of reflection and initiative.
+
+Let me give an illustration of what I will call the opposing methods of
+education.
+
+We will suppose, for the sake of argument, that the only available book
+for the instruction of a class of boys was that excellent but abstruse
+work known as 'Bradshaw's Railway Guide.' The modern schoolmaster would
+draw up an exhaustive and complicated scheme. So much time would be
+devoted to parsing every sentence through the book. The figures would be
+added up, and subtracted, and divided. He would concoct neat little
+mathematical problems: If the 11.40 express from Paddington travelled to
+Swindon at fifty miles an hour and broke down half-way, at what o'clock
+would the 12.15 parliamentary train overtake it? and so forth. But--most
+valuable exercise of all--long tables of trains would be learnt off by
+heart, with the names of stopping places and the prices of the
+first-class tickets.
+
+A genuine educationist would set to work in a much simpler fashion. He
+would tell the boys to look out a good train from Birmingham to
+Newcastle. Each boy would be free to tackle the problem in his own
+fashion, and the task--if successfully accomplished--would do much
+towards developing the thinking faculties.
+
+In any system of real education it would be impossible for the
+schoolmaster to dictate the subjects to which the pupil should give his
+attention, and it would be equally impossible for the parent to say 'I
+intend my son to enter such-and-such a profession.' Nobody can settle
+beforehand what talents the child is to develop. That is a private
+matter in which no third person has any right to interfere between the
+child itself and Nature.
+
+Modern education consists entirely of interference. There is, in the
+first place, the interference of the parent, who insists upon an
+artistic boy becoming a banker, puts an incipient tradesman into the
+army, or tries to make a scholar out of a mechanic. Then there comes the
+interference of the schoolmaster, who has his favourite recipe of Latin
+verses, quadratic equations, and what not, to stuff into every head he
+can get hold of for a few terms. Lastly appears the Government, which
+declares that nobody shall enter the army, or navy, or civil service,
+without devoting his best years to being crammed in such a scandalous
+fashion, that it is a toss-up whether he breaks down altogether under
+the ordeal, or simply forgets, a few months after the consummation of
+the process, all that has been pitchforked into his brain.
+
+When a baby is brought into the world the parents spend the first year
+of its life in wondering and speculating about its future. Will it be a
+great author, or a Bishop, or a Lord Chancellor? If its mouth twitches
+when anyone slams a door, or it gurgles happily when a note is struck on
+the piano, they declare it has genius for music; and if it amuses itself
+later on by crude efforts to draw distorted figures with distorted faces
+and distorted arms and legs, they jump to the conclusion that they have
+produced an infant Correggio.
+
+Why does all this anxiety about the child's individuality disappear the
+moment its intelligence begins to dawn? One must suppose, at any rate,
+that it does, because the parent immediately sets about getting all the
+originality knocked out of his offspring, and does not grudge the
+payment of heavy fees to secure this object.
+
+The dreams about the Lord Chancellorship, or the gold medal at the
+musical academy, vanish as if by magic. There is no more talk about
+bishoprics or artistic fame. The parents settle down to the conventional
+task of having the child fitted for something it has no desire to be;
+and the notion that the particular faculties they observed--or thought
+they observed--during its early infancy should or could be developed
+never appears to enter their heads for a moment.
+
+Some children develop later than others; but with proper care and
+encouragement it would be possible not to lead, but to follow, each
+child to its own bent. The child must show the way--that is the essence
+of real education, and it involves a complete upheaval of the principles
+upon which systems of instruction are at present founded.
+
+There is only one way in which people are now able to obtain a genuine
+education, and it goes by the name--applied with more or less
+contempt--of self-culture. The process consists simply in the individual
+choosing his own subjects and studying them as best he can. No doubt the
+method could be immensely extended and improved, for the self-cultured
+man has no mentor to guide him when he is in perplexity, and would
+profit by experienced advice.
+
+But even were this not the case, it would be far better to abolish
+schools and universities and to let everybody shift for himself, than to
+insist upon subjecting the youth of the nation to a system that
+ingeniously manufactures failures for every walk in life, and
+accomplishes practically nothing else.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE OPEN DOOR TO INTELLIGENCE
+
+
+It has been the chief aim in these pages, not to elaborate a scheme of
+education on new principles, but to point out the utter folly of
+persisting with a system that has worked a vast amount of evil, and
+cannot be proved to have achieved any real good.
+
+Our great men have not been the product of a school curriculum, or of an
+academic training. In no single instance, as far as can be ascertained,
+has nobility of character, or the possession of genius, or soundness of
+judgment, or even beauty of diction in literature, been attributable to
+the grind in grammatical rules, the fact-cramming, and the mental
+gymnastics which go to make up what is called 'a liberal education.'
+
+In science, where the highest intellectual qualities are brought into
+play, most of the great discoverers have owed their entire scientific
+knowledge to self-taught methods of investigation. And it is the same
+thing in every field of research where the thinking faculties must reach
+the supreme limit of development--namely, that nothing is traceable to
+academic learning, and that everything is owing to the mental
+initiative which is produced solely by self-inculcated habits of
+reflection.
+
+To give education systems the credit, or even a share in the credit, of
+all the splendid achievements in politics, science, art, and literature
+is sheer intellectual laziness. It is the curse of the age that few
+people will trouble to question the existing order of things, and that
+nobody--except those who make the manufacture of opinions their
+profession--can be found to express an independent opinion on any
+subject under the sun.
+
+That is one reason why newspapers exist in their present form. The
+leading article is primarily the invention of the stupid, conventional,
+well-educated man whose profound knowledge of dates and irregular verbs
+has, unfortunately, had the effect of preventing him from forming his
+own judgment on public affairs. The Press, which must have been
+originally established, like the famous _Peking Gazette_, for the
+dissemination of news, has long ago discovered that people prefer to
+obtain their opinions ready-made.
+
+The wise argument we hear being urged in a railway-carriage or at a
+dinner-table is merely an intellectual reach-me-down purchased at a
+book-stall for the modest price of one penny. If there were only one
+newspaper, and consequently only one leading article on a particular
+topic, political discussion would die a natural death.
+
+The political opinion to which the majestic alderman or the
+classically-trained savant gives such profound utterance is the opinion,
+not of himself, but of some poor devil who knows nothing of the
+blessings of a university education, but who writes in a garret, or in
+a dingy office off Fleet Street, to earn his bread and cheese.
+
+Its value or political insight need not be disparaged on that account. I
+would trust it a thousand times rather than I would trust the
+opinion--if such a thing should have any existence--of the average
+educated man whose brains have been jellified at school or college. The
+point is not the value of the humble scribe's opinion, however, but the
+fact that a man, of what would be called inferior educational
+attainments, has to be engaged to do mental work that cannot be
+performed by the brains of people who have enjoyed all the advantages
+that a first-rate education is supposed to confer.
+
+The vote of the working-man is scarcely more unintelligently applied at
+election times than the vote of the educated man. On the contrary, the
+former may be said to think independently, or at least to use an
+independent instinct, whilst the latter is contented to believe in the
+iniquity of one party or the virtue of another, according to the opinion
+of the man in the garret. The working man wants beer, and he knows it.
+The China question, the war in South Africa, the housing of the working
+classes, the great education controversy--everything is beer to him. It
+is the Government who cheapen beer, or who regulate the percentage of
+arsenic to be used in brewing, that command his support--not Ministers
+who promise to maintain British supremacy in the Far East, or who put
+forward an attractive programme of domestic legislation.
+
+The natural consequence of this wholesale production of dummy members of
+society is that the strings of government are really pulled by the
+intelligent few. Whatever the external constitution of Great Britain may
+be, the real power does not lie with Parliament or with the Executive,
+but is invariably wielded by one or more men of commanding ability.
+
+Nominally, the administration is in the hands of the social aristocracy,
+that is to say, of a few peer families and their innumerable relations.
+Whichever of the two great parties in the State may happen to be in
+power, the Government is invariably exploited by members of the peer
+class, who practically divide the spoils of office amongst themselves
+and their immediate entourage.
+
+Although, however, the English nobility manage to usurp all the offices
+of State, and to secure all the plums for themselves, it is not they who
+really govern the country. No doubt the landed aristocracy are
+politically the most fit to govern. They have no commercial or
+industrial interests that may bring corrupt and undesirable influences
+into public life. But they are unfitted for the position they ought to
+occupy by a system of education that manufactures mediocrity, and
+stifles the very qualities of imaginativeness and initiative which are
+indispensable to sound statesmanship.
+
+What is the inevitable result?
+
+The self-made man, with all his splendid intellectual faculties
+developed, with his independence of judgment, and his acquired habit of
+thinking for himself instead of leaning on precedent and borrowed
+wisdom, rides the dummy Government class with whip and spur. He lays on
+the lash here and digs in the rowels there, goading on his steed in any
+direction that chances to suit his purpose. He naturally places personal
+ambition in front of national expediency, because his political career
+is necessarily a constant fight against odds. Either he must rise
+superior to the peer combination, as Disraeli succeeded in doing after a
+struggle unparalleled in the annals of political history, or he will be
+crushed by it.
+
+But the necessities of his position render the self-made man a
+particularly undesirable element in the administration of public
+affairs. During the course of his successful upward struggle he has, in
+nine cases out of ten, entangled himself in commercial or industrial
+interests from which it is difficult or impossible for him to dissociate
+himself. By this means, and through the necessarily adventurous
+character of his political career, he can scarcely avoid becoming,
+however undeserved the imputation may be, an object of suspicion. And
+when once distrust of this kind has been allowed to permeate through our
+public life, the degeneration of parliamentary government must follow.
+
+Disraeli spent the greater part of his political life in manoeuvring
+for the premiership. When his object had been successfully attained, all
+his great qualities were turned to the advantage of the State. But up to
+that point he was compelled, in order to survive in his colossal
+struggle against the aristocratic element in politics, to play for his
+own hand.
+
+That must always be the case with the self-made man. His first objective
+must be his own self-preservation, and if he wishes to gain power he is
+bound to exploit the political situation, regardless of the best
+interests of the country, because every man's hand is against him until
+the summit of his ambition has been reached.
+
+Schools and colleges in which the mind is crammed instead of being
+developed cannot produce statesmen. They can manufacture in unlimited
+quantities the type of well-intentioned, honourable mediocrity with
+which our public service is stocked. But as long as this process is
+continued, the real power in the administration of the affairs of the
+Empire will remain virtually in the hands of a few able individuals of
+the wrong calibre. There will be a dummy Prime Minister, and a dummy
+Cabinet; but the wires will be worked by the self-made man who must
+place himself first and his country second, with consequences usually
+disastrous to the national welfare.
+
+There is no intended disparagement of the self-made man. He is, and
+always has been, the best intellectual product of the age. The greatest
+statesmen, philosophers, scientists, writers, and other men of genius
+have been self-made or self-cultured. But it does not follow because
+great statesmen have been self-made men, that it is for the good of the
+country that its rulers should be drawn from that class. As has already
+been pointed out, the self-made man usually creates far more mischief in
+the course of his upward political struggle, than is compensated for
+afterwards when he has secured his position and can turn his talents to
+the account of his country, instead of for the purpose of securing his
+own personal advancement.
+
+There is, it must be remembered, a national emergency for which we have
+to prepare. Our extended Imperial obligations, and the sharp commercial
+competition which has caused some of the great Powers to sacrifice
+individuality wholesale in order to mobilize an army of traders, make it
+imperative that measures should be taken to preserve the Anglo-Saxon
+race.
+
+The thing to avoid at this moment is imitation of tactics that will send
+every nation adopting them backward in evolution. To secure a temporary
+commercial triumph at the enormous sacrifice of the natural development
+of the individual, would be a fatal and short-sighted policy that could
+only end in national ruin. We have not yet reached the worst depths of
+the education fallacy, but we are complacently drifting in that
+direction.
+
+State interference in educational matters may be an excellent thing when
+the whole energies of the central authorities happen to be exerted in
+mitigation of the evils of the national system. But it must be borne in
+mind that political parties and the heads of departments are constantly
+changing in this country. The reformer of to-day may to-morrow be
+superseded by a retrogressive-minded mediocrity; and there would be no
+guarantee that the beneficial influence of the one would not be
+annihilated afterwards by the pernicious intermeddling of the other.
+
+Instead of casting about for means of securing a State monopoly of the
+ruinous type of education supplied by our schools and colleges, it would
+be more conducive to the salvation of the country if the whole energies
+of the nation were directed towards revolutionizing the system of
+instruction itself.
+
+If schoolmasters can accomplish nothing better than the manufacture of
+set types of humanity, the progress of mankind would be promoted more
+rapidly without their assistance.
+
+What is, after all, the main object of education?
+
+It is to assist everybody to develop his faculties and talents, so that
+he may be fitted for the position in life which Nature intended him to
+occupy.
+
+Nobody can assert for an instant that the conventional methods of
+instructing youth either achieve, or even appear to aim at achieving,
+this end. The school does not pretend to discover or to encourage
+individual talents. It offers to pound so much Latin grammar,
+mathematics, history, geography, etc., into each pupil, and to turn him
+out at the end of the process with exactly the same mental equipment as
+that acquired by the rest of his school-fellows.
+
+The principal aim of this book has been to draw attention to the
+incongruities and evils brought about by this sham and worthless system
+of education. That the world contains many illustrious examples of
+culture and genius is no proof that the slightest benefit has been
+derived by anybody from parsing Ovid or cramming facts and dates. 'The
+best part of every man's education,' said Sir Walter Scott, 'is that
+which he gives to himself'; and it might be added, with literal truth,
+that it is the only part which is of the slightest service in developing
+the mind with which he has been naturally endowed.
+
+All that I have presumed to advocate is that the door should be left
+open to intelligence.
+
+The education systems of the present day are particularly felicitous in
+keeping it firmly closed. It is only by dodging the schoolmaster and the
+coach that youthful talent stands a chance of being brought to maturity.
+The greatest achievements are not the work of senior wranglers and
+Balliol scholars: they have been accomplished by class-room dunces, like
+Clive and Wellington; by school idlers, such as Napoleon, Disraeli,
+Swift, and Newton; or by self-taught men like Stephenson, John Hunter,
+Livingstone, and Herschel.
+
+It cannot be doubted that the institution of a rational method of
+developing the mind of the individual would sweep away all these
+anomalies. There are thousands of men in responsible positions who would
+willingly exchange their entire stock of classical or mathematical
+knowledge for a modicum of common sense and judgment. If everybody were
+encouraged to think for himself, the Empire would have no lack of good
+servants to carry on the traditions of the past; and the dummy unit of
+administration would give place to a self-reliant man, capable of moving
+with the times, and of serving the public interest according to its
+wants, instead of clinging merely to routine and precedent.
+
+Nearly all the misery suffered by humanity has been produced by
+artificial means. Providence did not intend this world to be a place of
+purgatory for the majority of mankind. We are what we have made
+ourselves, and not what evolution intended us to be. It is in our power
+to mitigate much of the evil we have ignorantly manufactured for our own
+discomfiture, if we only attack it at the roots. And the greatest curse
+humanity has laid upon itself is that arbitrary interference with the
+natural development of the mind which is misnamed 'education.'
+
+THE END
+
+
+BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Curse of Education, by Harold E. Gorst
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CURSE OF EDUCATION ***
+
+***** This file should be named 29630.txt or 29630.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/9/6/3/29630/
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow, Susan Skinner and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.