The Curse of Education

by Harold Edward Gorst

Man is himself responsible for the present state of human affairs; and although great things have been undeniably accomplished during the progress of the nations, the magnificent achievements of exceptional individuals pale beside the stupendous blundering of the many.

It must surely be clear to everybody that there has been some evil influence at work to arrest the fair promise and development of the human race. The splendid march of intellectual progress from the dark ages to the brilliant dawn of the nineteenth century, with its glittering array of master minds and its titanic roll of genius, has been suddenly brought to a dead halt. Here and there, during the past generation, great figures have struggled up on to the world's stage and grappled with the ebb-tide. But the majestic stream of mediocrity has swept away their dykes, and obliterated their landmarks with its increasing volume.

The remarkable fact can hardly have escaped attention that the more humanity attempts to equip itself for the serious business of life, by forcing itself into an educational strait-waistcoat, the more rapid becomes the disappearance of character and genius, and even of ordinary talent. Everybody is getting ground down to a level. It is scarcely possible to point to a single civilized man and say: 'There is somebody in whom every faculty has been developed and natural talent perfected to its utmost capability.' The most that can be said of the individual is: 'There goes a Cambridge man or a grammar-school man, and when you have knocked all the nonsense out of him you'll find he's not a bad fellow at bottom.'

We are not what we have made ourselves, but what we have chosen to allow others to make us. Whatever may once have been the nursery of the human race, it is now to a great extent the school. Some part—it generally is the best part—of education takes place outside the class-room; but it must be remembered that the atmosphere of home is generally impregnated with the conventional traditions of the school and of the university.

The evil influence that is so obviously undermining social and national life must, therefore, first be sought in the principles upon which education systems have been founded.

Nothing is more astonishing than to reflect upon the unintelligent grounds on which people base their adherence to the principles of modern education. They are unable, in the first place, to get over the fact that their forefathers were brought up in the same fashion before them. It is a sheer impossibility for most people to question anything that has been going on for any length of time unchecked.

The undisputed possession of a custom for so many years converts it into the legal property of the nation, whence it derives a sacred character, and nobody dreams of meddling with it. Any abuses it may bring in its train are then conveniently ascribed to the perversity of Providence. The cherished convention is never questioned. That is the remarkable thing about it. People can be brought to understand, by means of a flourish of dazzling prospectuses and newspaper advertisements, that a bicycle is an improvement on a bone-shaker, or that pneumatic tyres are more comfortable on rough roads than iron-rimmed wheels. But that appears to be the set limit of their comprehension.

They are capable of being made to grasp, after nearly exhausting the resources of a wealthy syndicate, something that obviously affects their material comfort. But progress in ideas, or anything in the shape of moral revolution, has to undergo a thousand-fold more tortuous process before it can be made to filter through a convention. The academic product is, it must be remembered, a bundle of conventions. If the article has been properly manufactured, and bears the hall-mark of the maker and the stamp of the country of its origin, there is nothing else there for the truth to filter into. It simply drops through and vapourizes without disturbing anything.

Conventionality is therefore an insuperable obstacle, as far as the majority of minds are concerned, to the discovery that the established principles of education are absolutely false. These principles will never be questioned. It is good enough for the average man that his fellow-creatures have been contented with them since time immemorial, and that they are diligently practised in the schools and colleges whose names have been household words for generations past.

Next to this antiquated conservatism of the least intelligent and most dispiriting type, comes the false shame that the majority of people exhibit when caught displaying ignorance of any of the facts which cramming systems have pronounced to be indispensable to a general education. Probably more real culture is nipped in the bud by the ridiculous assumption that everybody must be a walking encyclopædia, than by all the Philistine conventions and stupidities put together.