EDUCATION ALARMISTS.
That a little learning is a dangerous thing, is an old saying, which has been fearfully repeated in these days; but a little learning every one will have, and the only way of averting the danger is, by providing the people with all facilities for acquiring more.
Lord Stowell was no admirer of the prevailing rage for universal education, and made a remark with which Lord Sidmouth was much struck: “If you provide,” he said, “a larger amount of cultivated talent than there is a demand for, the surplus is very likely to turn sour.”
Sir John Coleridge, in expressing his high sense of the obligations of the country to the University of Oxford for their recent aids to Middle-Class Education, says: “If the lower orders are to be raised in political power in this country, to make that a blessing you must cultivate the lower orders for discharging the duties to be thrown upon them. Therefore it is that I think the University of Oxford conferred the largest benefit that it had in its power to confer upon this country at large, when, passing simply from the education of the higher orders and those who were destined for the Church, it spread out its hands in a frank and liberal spirit to all classes of society, and offered to connect every body with itself, in a certain measure, who would only fit himself for it by proper application.”