The Curse of Education

by Harold Edward Gorst

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.