ghtest benefit has been
derived by anybody from parsing Ovid or cramming facts and dates. 'The
best part of every man's education,' said Sir Walter Scott, 'is that
which he gives to himself'; and it might be added, with literal truth,
that it is the only part which is of the slightest service in developing
the mind with which he has been naturally endowed.

All that I have presumed to advocate is that the door should be left
open to intelligence.

The education systems of the present day are particularly felicitous in
keeping it firmly closed. It is only by dodging the schoolmaster and the
coach that youthful talent stands a chance of being brought to maturity.
The greatest achievements are not the work of senior wranglers and
Balliol scholars: they have been accomplished by class-room dunces, like
Clive and Wellington; by school idlers, such as Napoleon, Disraeli,
Swift, and Newton; or by self-taught men like Stephenson, John Hunter,
Livingstone, and Herschel.

It cannot be doubted that the institution of a rational method of
developing the mind of the individual would sweep away all these
anomalies. There are thousands of men in responsible positions who would
willingly exchange their entire stock of classical or mathematical
knowledge for a modicum of common sense and judgment. If everybody were
encouraged to think for himself, the Empire would have no lack of good
servants to carry on the traditions of the past; and the dummy unit of
administration would give place to a self-reliant man, capable of moving
with the times, and of serving the public interest according to its
wants, instead of clinging merely to routine and precedent.

Nearly all the misery suffered by humanity has been produced by
artificial means. Providence did not intend this world to be a place of
purgatory for the majority of mankind. We are what we have made
ourselves, and not what evolution intended us to be. It is in our power
to mitigate much of the evil we have ignorantly manufactured for our own
discomfiture, if we only attack it at the roots. And the greatest curse
humanity has laid upon itself is that arbitrary interference with the
natural development of the mind which is misnamed 'education.'

THE END

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD

End of Project Gutenberg's The Curse of Education, by Harold E. Gorst

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CURSE OF EDUCATION ***

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