IS EDUCATION WASTED? by H. T. Edge, B. A. (Cantab.)
NO question is agitating us more than that of how to educate our young people. We know there is something wrong about our achievements in education, but we are often mistaken as to where the fault lies. The commonest mistake is to confound principles with practice and to blame the former where perhaps it is the latter which is at fault. We fail to carry out certain plans, and we blame the plans and want to make a clean sweep of them; when perhaps inefficiency in applying them is what is really the matter. In fact, it is probably inefficiency, rather than wrong principles, that is the matter with our educational doings, as it is in the case of so many others of our doings. Before we condemn a method, we should ask whether that method is being given a fair trial. If we sweep away the system, without removing the general inefficiency, then the same failure will attend our efforts to apply any new system that may be devised. We shall have exchanged one evil for another.
There is more than one side to every question; but many of the utterances on the educational difficulty give only one side. The result is views that are extreme and ill-considered. Let us take a case.
Much of education is considered by some critics to be superfluous and wasted, for the reason that it seems to bear no immediate and visible fruit. Hence they wish to abolish it. Yet it is always possible that it may bear fruit after all, but not of the kind they are able to see. Take, for instance, the case of a girl of ordinary type, without any definite characteristics whether good or bad. She is sent to school and college. She is taught algebra and geometry, Latin and Greek, music and painting, with many other subjects. She is reasonably clever and absorbs all this with interest and ease. She leaves college—and never again opens a book. The whole is quietly forgotten with as much nonchalance as it was acquired. Is all the time and money and effort, on the part of pupil and teachers, wasted?
Or let it be a boy, who has been taught similar subjects, but takes up a calling in which they are not used. Is the instruction wasted? The question arises in various forms, of which these two cases may be taken as typical examples.
If it is true that the education thus given is really wasted, what folly could be greater than that of continuing to impart it! Yet we know that somehow the view taken is too extreme; that it is not in accordance with the fitness of things that work involving so much zeal, enthusiasm, and other good qualities should fall fruitless; that people would not go on doing it if they did not have some intuition that the labor is not really in vain.
In short, may it not be possible that this is one of those cases in which a dilemma has arisen through the limitation of our knowledge of human nature and the laws of life; a dilemma resolvable by the wider knowledge shed by Theosophy? A knowledge of Reincarnation, the dual nature of man, and other related matters, clears up many of the enigmas of life, as for instance what becomes of all the abilities and experience which a man has garnered during life, when he dies. May not a similar knowledge shed light on the present problem also? If so, then our beliefs would be reconciled with our intuitions, and practices which logic has seemed to condemn might be vindicated in the light of fuller knowledge.
For one thing, a conviction of the continuity of individual existence beyond the grave, in other earth-lives, more or less similar to the present life, affects the whole question profoundly. For we may at once infer that knowledge accumulated now, but not immediately used, may be used later on. And indeed this idea quite agrees with what many analogies from Nature suggest. Youth is the time for study; maturer age brings other duties. Let us compare a lifetime with a day. In the morning a man studies many subjects; but after noon he shuts his books, never thinks of them again, and spends the remainder of the day in other occupations, followed by recreation and ending in sleep. Has his labor been wasted? Nay, for he will resume it next morning. Can we not apply this analogy to the case of the young person whose education has had, or seemed to have, no immediate practical result?
We thus see how limited views as regards the duration of life may influence the question. But there are other limitations in our views; let us see how these in turn may affect the question.