PRACTICAL DISCIPLINE.
The want of Practical Discipline has been thus put by a writer in Blackwood’s Magazine: “What is the use of battering a man’s brains full of Greek and Latin pothooks, that he forgets before he doffs his last round-jacket or puts on his first long-tailed blue, if ye don’t teach him the old Spartan virtue of obedience, hard living, early rising, and them sort of classics? Where’s the use of instructing him in hexameters or pentameters, if you would leave him in ignorance of the value of a pennypiece? What height of stupidity it is to be fillin’ a boy’s brains with the wisdom of the ancients, and then turn him out like an omadhaum, to pick up his victuals among the moderns!”
With equal truth, but finer humour, has Sydney Smith, at his own expense, exposed this neglect of the practical as a fair indication of the mode of English education. He is writing to his publisher, whom he tells: “I have twice endeavoured to write the word skipping—‘skipping spirit.’ Your printer first printed it ’stripling,’ and then altered it into stripping. The fault is entirely mine. I was fifteen years at school and college—I know something about the Romans and the Athenians, and have read a good deal about the præter-perfect tense—but I cannot do a sum in simple addition, or write a handwriting which any body can read.”