ithe 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 G