The Curse of Education

by Harold Edward Gorst

In the course of a recent conversation with an exceptionally brilliant woman of my acquaintance, it transpired that she believed Winchester and Cambridge to be in the same county. This lack of geographical knowledge did not appear, however, to have impaired her intellectual faculties. There are many persons who can accurately locate any town in England, and yet are vastly inferior in mental capacity to the lady who thought that Cambridge was in Hampshire.

Why should an individual know more than it is useful and convenient for him to know? For the student of foreign politics it is essential to be aware of the geographical difference between Tokio and Peking; but of what earthly use would this knowledge be to a man who devoted the whole of his life to inquiring into the domestic routine of the extinct dodo, or to the improvement of agriculture by the application of scientific manures?

Life is short, and it is only possible within the limits of the brief span allotted to us upon earth to acquire a certain number of facts. It is monstrously absurd to sacrifice our best years in stuffing so many facts into the brain, in order to avoid being laughed at by a few thin-minded pedants as an ignoramus. Some consolation, at least, might surely be derived from the reflection that many of the greatest geniuses whom the world has produced were profoundly ignorant as to ninety per cent. of the things which are considered to be indispensable knowledge at the present day.

Nobody can hope to read all the books that are popularly supposed to have been digested by the well-educated man. It would be impossible to get through a tithe of them. Yet how many people there are who will sooner tell a deliberate lie, than acknowledge having omitted to read some classic that happens to be mentioned in the course of conversation! And this is simply due to the infatuated belief that culture consists in stuffing one's self with the ideas of other people. A man whose brain was teeming with his own thoughts and creations, but who had neglected to stock it with the hundred thousand conventional facts culled from the hundred best books selected for him by other people, would be looked upon as an uneducated boor by cultured pedants of the conventional type.

It will be seen, therefore, that this false shame, inspired by an unwholesome terror of public ridicule, plays a very important part in tying people to the apron-strings of education, and warping their judgment.

But there is also a third factor which must be taken seriously into account. This is the widespread credulousness not only as to the efficacy, but as to the indispensability, of the ordinary methods of instruction as mental training. People have actually come to believe that no one can think without being taught to do so by means of all kinds of mathematical and classical gymnastics.

Whence comes this monstrous notion I do not pretend to be capable of explaining—I merely note its universal existence. Probably no doctrine is more deeply ingrained in the mind of the average person. There does not seem to be any logic or sense in it; but somebody with a huge sense of humour must have once started the craze—much in the way that a practical joker will stare intently at nothing in a London street until he has collected a large and inquisitive crowd, and will then steal quietly away, leaving everybody looking vacuously at the same spot.

In the whole history of education there is no greater absurdity than the notion that a boy can be taught to think by training his mind backwards and forwards in the conjugation of irregular verbs and the vagaries of Latin or Greek inflections. Exercises of this ingeniously ridiculous kind only serve to empty the brain of ideas, and to make room for the reception of facts crammed in on the wholesale system. It is an accepted fact, however, that the brain, in order to pursue its normal functions, must first be subjected to a course of training in abstract subjects as far removed as possible from all human interest; that common sense, in other words, is a product of Greek roots and algebraical formulæ—not of the natural application of the thinking faculties to the ordinary circumstances of everyday life.

The hopeless imbecility of this tenet of faith is only equalled by the depth to which it has taken root in the popular mind. The wonderful thing is that the total failure of the plan has not long ago convinced everybody of its uselessness. But that is at once the mischief and the charm of the convention: no amount of practical demonstration will prejudice anybody against it.

In this way the great fallacy of education has been allowed to grow up and to spread its false and obnoxious principles like a network over the whole civilized world. With all the baneful effects produced by these fallacious dogmas staring them in the face, people do not seem to have been capable of tumbling to the fact that the origin of the social evils which surround them lies in the very calf of gold that they and their forefathers have set up and worshipped.