This aim being accomplished, his educational career is over. He has graduated; that is to say, he has obtained a certificate to the effect that he has acquired a certain regulation stock of knowledge.
What happens next?
The unhappy graduate suddenly makes the discovery that his university qualification is not the ready passport to employment that he had fondly imagined it to be. Unless he has a reasonable chance of a curacy and chooses to enter the Church, or can scrape together a few pupils to coach, or has the means to go on reading for the Bar or cramming for the public examinations, his prospects of immediate starvation are excessively favourable.
It was remarked some years ago by a writer who had spent a great deal of time in investigating life at common lodging-houses in the poorer districts of the Metropolis, that a startling number of university men seemed to drift into them. Yet these are the men who are supposed to have qualified themselves most highly for the holding of good positions. In some way, therefore, it is clear that this academic training has disadvantages which serve to handicap its victims severely in practical life. It cannot be mere accident that those who, according to all educational tradition, are classed as the most fit for responsible employment necessitating good mental ability, actually labour under obvious disabilities in this connection.
Nobody can urge that there is not enough work of a nature demanding high attainments to go round. Literature itself offers an enormous field for the exhibition of special talent; and there are many other walks in life where mental superiority is sadly needed, and which should therefore provide ample work and remuneration for those who show capability and resource. But in spite of all these openings some of our scholars are driven to eke out a miserable pauper's existence in the common lodging-house, or even in extreme cases to solicit parish relief.
The explanation of this strange anomaly lies simply in the fact that the educational mill not only manufactures dummies, but makes them all exactly alike. In the higher types of schools and colleges there is generally a choice of three patterns—the classical dummy, the modern language dummy, and the scientific dummy. But each pattern is very like the other, for all the practical purposes of this life; that is to say, they are all equally useless and equally unfitted for the task of moving forward with the times.
The result of fitting out everybody with a common stock of knowledge is to institute a disastrous form of intellectual competition. Thousands of young men are being equipped annually by our schools and universities for the performance of precisely the same functions. Intelligence brought wholesale to the market in this stereotyped form is in much the same unhappy condition as unskilled labour. There is a supply far in excess of the demand, and consequently employment cannot be found for all.
Perhaps the profession of literature and journalism affords the aptest illustration of the utter folly and uselessness of producing these machine-made scholars, all filled chock-full with the same ideas, facts, figures, and dates. Here, as in reality everywhere else, there is need of originality, intellectual independence, insight, judgment, and imagination. Journalism wants ideas; facts are amply provided by the news agency and the reporter. The gates of literature are opened wide for striking and vigorous thought, trenchant criticism, and imaginative flights of fancy.
What has the average academically-trained man to offer? He has an assortment of second-hand ideas borrowed from Plato and Socrates, from Ovid and Virgil and Horace; he can echo Voltaire, Goethe, Kant, Shakespeare, Dante; he can dish up Aristotle, Pythagoras, Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday and Darwin. He can borrow illustrations from classical mythology; he knows the Dynasties of ancient Egypt; and he is able to furnish, without reference to history, the exact date upon which King John signed Magna Charta, and the precise number of battles fought in the Wars of the Roses.
Such are the literary accomplishments of numberless university graduates, and it is small wonder that they often lead to the workhouse. The demand for the dressed-up ideas of the poets, philosophers, and scientists of a former generation is not great. Those who like their literature at second hand prefer snippets from the Newgate Calendar to the wise saws of Bacon; and they would rather have their blood stirred by quotations from 'The Charge of the Light Brigade,' or 'Pay, pay, pay,' than read a paraphrase of the combined wisdom of all the philosophers of the nineteenth century.