The Curse of Education

by Harold Edward Gorst

The main thing that is required to carry out the true principle of education is more individual common sense and less State interference. The mischievous enactment that children should commence any process of instruction at the tender age of five should be at once struck off the statute-book. No doubt something would have to be done to remove young children of the poorest class, in large towns at least, from the influence of sordid homes for a certain period of the day. It does not follow, however, that they should be subjected to the routine of an elementary school and crammed with superficial and unsuitable knowledge.

Children want room to think; their minds have to grow up as well as their bodies. Mental nourishment is quite as necessary as physical nourishment; but it is nonsensical to apply them both in the same fashion. The mind has to be fed in a totally different manner to the body. The former is a delicate operation, that requires far more care and common sense than is necessary for the boiling of milk or the preparation of an infant food.

The child's mind is not a blank, upon which anything may be written at will; it is scored invisibly with heredity and individual tendencies. The function of the parent is to see that nothing is done to destroy this delicate fabric, and to watch carefully for revelations of natural bent and character, in order to encourage and develop them.

Anything in the shape of actual teaching or instruction ought to be rigorously avoided. Facts should be regarded as poisons, to be used sparingly and with discrimination. Every time that a fact is imparted an idea is driven out. That should be carefully borne in mind. The operation of the simplest fact upon the intelligence is highly complex. It is not only a thing to imprint upon the memory, but it is also a means of diverting thought into the channels of the commonplace. Every fact closes up an avenue of the imagination.

To take an illustration, let us suppose someone to impart to a little child the information that it is a physiological impossibility for angels to have wings as well as arms. This prosaic piece of intelligence would, in one moment, annihilate most of the romance of childhood. It would be a blow from which the imagination might never recover. The child would, by a rapid process of thought, lose all faith in fairyland, and in the thousand and one fancies of the youthful brain that are the mainspring of the development of the imagination.

Why is it that ninety-nine persons out of a hundred lose this faculty in the earliest period of their childhood? It is simply because their bringing-up has consisted in a persistent inoculation with the material facts of life, and a correspondingly persistent elimination of all imaginative ideas. 'Don't let the children believe such rubbish!' is a constant ejaculation of the mechanical-minded person who does not permit himself to suffer any illusions, and who has long since 'done with romance and all that kind of twaddle.'

At any cost the imagination of the child should be encouraged and developed. It is the richest vein in the whole mental machinery of man, the faculty within which genius most frequently lurks, and where it can be most easily and permanently destroyed. Grown-up people should remember that an indiscreet answer to a childish question, or a snub administered to an inquiring mind, is often sufficient to check thought. It should be mainly the care of the parent to encourage the imagination in young children, recollecting that up to a certain age its development depends upon all the absurdities and fantastic notions of childhood which the average adult is so fond of repressing.

By the exercise of prudence and some show of sympathy, it would then be possible to bring a child up to the age of seven or eight without damaging its mind or destroying its faculties. From that point onwards the child's education ought to depend upon the individual himself. There should be no such thing as instruction, in the sense which implies the cramming of the brain with information, or such mental gymnastics as conjugating irregular verbs and hunting for the least common multiple.

The position of teacher and pupil would have to be practically reversed. The pupil would lead, and the teacher follow. In fact, the latter should become an adviser rather than instructor, the child selecting those studies, or those arts or crafts, which are to be made the principal objective of its education, whilst to the mentor would fall the rôle of encouraging and assisting the course of study or practice at a morally safe distance.

Boys and girls would then not learn, but investigate. The process of learning should be got rid of altogether, being a clumsy, dronish way of acquiring knowledge, and one that tends to keep the brain in a perpetual state of dependence.