this tradition. It is to be noticed, therefore, that in our
modern education the sense of the term has been much narrowed, since we
mean by it book learning or schooling. Teachers are not wanting who
teach manners and mores out of zeal and ambition, and families and
churches can be found which duly supplement the work of schools, but
the institutions follow no set plan of cooperation, and one or another
of them fails in its part. The modern superstition of education contains
a great error. It is forgotten that there is always a loss and offset
from education in its narrow sense. Petrie, speaking from observation
and experience of Egyptian peasants, says: "The harm is that you
manufacture idiots. Some of the peasantry are taught to read and write,
and the result of this burden, which their fathers bore not, is that
they become fools. I cannot say this too plainly: An Egyptian who has
had reading and writing thrust on him is, in every case that I have met
with, half-witted, silly, or incapable of taking care of himself. His
intellect and his health have been undermined by the forcing of
education."[2210] Petrie's doctrine is that each generation of men of
low civilization can be advanced beyond the preceding one only by a very
small percentage. He does not lay stress on the stimulation of vanity
and false pride. If he is right, his doctrine explains the complaints of
"missionary-made men" which we hear from Miss Kingsley and others, and
such social results as are described by Becke.[2211] Amongst ourselves
also the increase of insanity, nervous diseases, crime, and suicide must
be ascribed in part to the constant and more intense brain strain,
especially in youth. Women also, as they participate more in the
competition of life, have to get more education, and they fall under the
diseases also. The cases of child suicide are the most startling product
of our ways of education. These personal and social diseases are a part
of the price we pay for "higher civilization." They are an offset to
education and they go with it. It would be great ignorance of the course
of effort in societal matters not to know that such diseased reactions
must always be expected.

+701. Schools make persons all on one pattern. Orthodoxy.+ School
education, unless it is regulated by the best knowledge and good sense,
will produce men and women who are all of one pattern, as if turned in a
lathe. When priests managed schools it was their intention to