XLI
OF EDUCATION
Father Payne generally declined to talk about education. "Teaching is one of the things, like golf and hunting, which is exciting to do and pleasant to remember, but intolerable to talk about," he said one evening.
"Well," I said, "it is certainly intolerable to listen to people discussing education, or to read about it; but if you know anything about it, I should have thought it was good fun to talk about it."
"Ah," said Father Payne, "you say, 'If you know anything about it.' The worst of it is that everybody knows everything about it. A man who is a success, thinks that his own education is the only one worth having; a man who is a failure thinks that all systems of education are wrong. And as for talking about teaching, you can't talk about it—you can only relate your own experience, and listen with such patience as you can muster to another man relating his. That's not talking!"
"But it is interesting in a general way," said Vincent,—"the kind of thing you are aiming at, what you want to produce, and so on."
"Yes, my dear Vincent," said Father Payne, "but education isn't that—it's an obstinate sort of tradition; it's a quest, like the Philosopher's Stone. Most people think that it is a sort of charm which, if you could discover it, would transmute all baser metals into gold. The justification of the Philosopher's Stone is, I suppose, that different metals are not really different substances, but only different arrangements of the same atoms. But we can't predicate that of human spirits as yet; and to attempt to find one formula of education is like planting the same crop in different soils. It is the ridiculous democratic doctrine of human equality which is the real difficulty. There is no natural equality in human nature, and the question really is whether you are going to try to reduce all human beings to the same level, which is the danger of discipline, or to let people follow their own instincts unchecked, which is the shadow of liberty. I'm all for liberty, of course."
"But why 'of course'?" said Vincent.
"Because I take the aristocratic view," said Father Payne, "which is that you do more for the human race by having a few fine people, than by having an infinite number of second-rate people. What the first-rate man thinks to-day, the second-rate people think to-morrow—that is how we make progress; and I would like to take infinite pains with the best material, if I could find it, and leave discipline for the second-rate. The Jews and the Greeks, both first-class nations, have done more for the world on the whole than the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, who are the best of the second-rate stocks."
"But how are you going to begin to sort your material?" said Barthrop.