SELF-FORMATION.
The one great object—the finality—of rational Education is Self-instruction. In mind as well as body we are children at first, only that we may afterwards become men; dependent upon others, in order that we may learn from them such lessons as may tend eventually to our edification on an independent basis of our own. The knowledge of facts, or what is generally called learning, however much we may possess of it, is useful so far only as we erect its materials into a mental framework; but useless, utterly, as long as we suffer it to lie in a heap, inert and without form. The instruction of others, compared with self-instruction, is like the law compared with faith; a discipline of preparation, beggarly elements, a schoolmaster to lead us on to a state of greater worthiness, and there give up the charge of us.
“Every man,” says Gibbon, “who rises above the common level, receives two educations—the first from his instructors; the second, the most personal and important, from himself.” Almost all Lord Eldon’s legal education was from himself, without even the ordinary helps, which he disdainfully flung from him; and of no one could it be more truly predicated, that he was not “rocked and dandled” into a lawyer.
The Rev. Sydney Smith has thus sketched a scheme, in which he deems it of the highest importance that the education of a British youth were directed to the true principles of legislation: what effect laws can produce upon opinions, and opinions upon laws; what subjects are fit for legislative interference, and when men may be left to the management of their own interests. The mischief occasioned by bad laws, and the perplexity which arises from a multiplicity of laws; the causes of national wealth; the relations of foreign trade; the encouragement of agricultures and manufactures; the fictitious wealth occasioned by paper-credit; the use and abuse of monopoly; the theory of taxation; the consequences of the public debt: these are some of the subjects and some of the branches of civil education, to which we would turn the minds of future judges, future senators, and future noblemen. After the first period of life had been given up to the cultivation of the classics, and the remaining powers were beginning to evolve themselves, these are some of the propensities in study which we would endeavour to inspire.