The Curse of Education

by Harold Edward Gorst

Instances of the kind might be multiplied. Milton himself began life as a schoolmaster, and the father of Turner, one of the greatest landscape painters who ever lived, did his best to turn his brilliant son into a barber. The point, however, is obvious enough without the need of further illustration. A few examples have been adduced of great geniuses who have contrived, by the accident of circumstances or through sheer force of character, to escape from an environment which was forced upon them against their natural inclination. But it is not everybody who is gifted with such commanding talent and so much obstinacy and perseverance as to be able to overcome the artificial obstacles placed in the way of his individual tendencies; and now we have, what happily did not exist in the day of Herschel, Faraday, Turner, Linnæus and others—a compulsory education system to strangle originality and natural development at the earliest possible stage.

Most people would probably find it far easier to quote instances offhand of friends who had missed their proper vocation in life than of those who were placed exactly in the position best suited to their taste and capacity. The failures in life are so obviously in excess of those who may be said to have succeeded that specific illustrations of the fact are hardly necessary.

One has only to exert ordinary powers of observation to perceive that the world is not at all well ordered in this respect. It has already been pointed out that the public service and the professions are almost entirely filled with what must be called mediocrity; and one of the most potent causes of this unhappy state of affairs is the exquisite infallibility with which a blind system is constantly forcing square pegs into round holes.

Every profession and calling teems with examples. There are men, intended by nature to be artists and musicians, leading a wretched and unnatural existence in many a merchant's office because their best faculties were undeveloped during the early years of schooling. Mathematicians, philosophers, even poets, are tied to trade or to some equally unsuitable occupation. Scores of so-called literary men ought to be calculating percentages or selling dry goods; and no doubt there are shop-assistants and stock-jobbers who might, if led into the path of culture, have become creditable authors and journalists.

This is neither joke nor satire. It is sober earnest, as many observant readers will readily testify. The loss is not only to the individual, it is to society at large, and to the whole world. No one will deny the fact; but to how many will it occur that such anomalies cannot be the outcome of natural development and progress, but that they must be directly or indirectly attributable to some artificial cause?

It is the great difficulty against which all human advancement has to contend, that people can rarely be brought to question principles which have become a part and parcel of their everyday existence. There are plenty of individuals who are ready to tinker with existing institutions, and who erroneously dignify that process by the name of reform. But nothing is more despairing than the effort to convince conventionally brought up people that some cherished convention, with which the world has put up for an indefinite period, is founded upon fallacy, and ought to be cast out root and branch.

Even in the United States, where far greater efforts are made to encourage individuality in the schools and colleges than is the case with the countries of the Old World, people are not much better distributed amongst the various professions and occupations than they are here. I have made inquiries amongst Americans of wide experience and observation, and have learnt that nothing is more common in the States than to find individuals brought up to exercise functions for which they are wholly unfitted by natural capacity and inclination.

An instance was given me, by an American friend, of a boy who spent all his leisure in constructing clever little mechanical contrivances, in running miniature locomotives, and in setting up electric appliances of one kind and another. One day the youth's father came to him and said: 'I don't know what to make of B——. Could you find him a place in a wholesale merchant's office?' When it was pointed out to the parent that his son showed unmistakable mechanical genius, he obstinately insisted on getting the boy a situation for which he was quite unsuited, and which was highly distasteful to him.

I quote this instance to show that the parent is often as bad an educator as the school itself. In this case the school would have taken as little notice of the boy's natural bent as his father. It would, in all probability, never have discovered it at all. But it has become so much an accepted axiom that children are to be manufactured into anything that happens to suit the taste or convenience of their guardians, that it probably never occurred to the parent in question that he was committing a cruel and foolish act in forcing his son out of the path into which the boy's natural instinct was guiding him. The youth who might have pursued a happy and prosperous career as a mechanical engineer is now a disappointed man, struggling on, with little hope of success, in an occupation which does not interest him, and for which he does not possess the slightest adaptability.

Every nation is equally at fault in this respect. In Germany, for instance, the child is quite as much a pawn at the disposal of its parent and the school system as it is elsewhere. I spent a number of years in the country, and enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with many German families. Nothing has left upon my mind a deeper impression than the tragedy I witnessed of a boy being gradually and systematically weaned from the pursuit to which he was passionately devoted, and forced into a career utterly unsympathetic and distasteful to his peculiar temperament.