Arthur Machen

“ One discovers but little hope for such men as these; and the so-called education that is given them is probably but the adding of fuel to the flames of their burning—it is a giving of a picture gallery to a blind man. ”

“ These men, then, I think we may call educated; these makers of beauty, these dwellers amongst sculptured loveliness, these men who made the images of the Eternal Glory. Even "business men" might pause and reflect, for it seems that in the long run it pays not to be a Brute, that there is actually "money" in being a man, instead of being a wretched slave-driver and stink-finger and erector of "free" churches which blaspheme the sun and the sky and the flowers and the light of day in their stones as in their doctrine. ”

“ How can we expect a "factory hand" to realise the beauty, the wonder, the mystery of anything whatever when his whole life is passed in some soul- and mind- and body-destroying occupation; when his daily work is hardly more intelligent than that of the cogs and endless bands and poison vats which he has to supervise—and his only holiday is made up of a nightmare called "t' coop," washed down with much adulterated beer? A man who lives such a life can see nothing and understand nothing ”

“ Let us do justice to the system; the public school boy's master has brought the art of not teaching anything in particular and of doing everything in the wrong way to such an exquisite pitch that very few boys leave their school with any ideas worth speaking of on any subject whatever. ”

“ Macaulay, of course, thought that the age of real education, of true enlightenment, had only just begun in his own time. From his point of view all creation had been groaning for countless centuries under a dark pall of ignorance; the Greeks were almost as bad as the people in the Middle Ages—neither the one or the other had so much as thought of the steam engine ”

“ There is, then, no necessary connection between "book-learning" and education; many men have been educated in the very highest degree who could not tell B or Beth or Beta from a bull's foot.
Of course, in the days when the great majority of men were really educated, education was not so much in books as in the whole structure of life ”

“ All this is granted; nothing is omitted which may convince the boy that all learning is a disagreeable folly, and that literature is one of the most tiresome of the many forms of "rot." In ten years' time the average public school man has shed all the useless catalogue of facts and dates and notes that he has been forced to stuff into his brain.
But, unfortunately, there is much else that he cannot shed. It is easy enough to forget the date of Agincourt and the rules relative to the optative and the oratio obliqua. ”

“ So much for the education of the people who work with their hands, of the poor—worse still is the case of the rich. The poor have many ills to endure; but they have nothing quite so bad as the Great English Public School System. ”

“ The barns, the hovels, the bowls and platters, the pot that hung over the farmhouse fire, the very nails that studded the doors—all the things that this age made are now objects on which we barbarians look with longing; and if we have money we pay artists and skilled artisans to imitate for us, as well as they can, the work of the mediæval blacksmith and carpenter. If we could have a little village church, just as it was before the "schoolmasters" of the Reformation began to be abroad, the wealth of an American millionaire could hardly purchase it ”

“ One hopes that there are very few children of the County Council who in after life remember any thing whatever as to the height of Mont Blanc, the course of the Dneiper, the date of the invention of gunpowder, or the difference between a calyx and a stamen. But the public school boy does not escape so easily. It is not that he is burdened with learning, useful or useless; he does not worry his friends by repeating Greek choruses in a rapt undertone between the courses at dinner ”

“ Wonders and mysteries were about all his ways; his eyes beheld beauty, and his lips uttered beauty. This was an "educated" man; and till people learn that all these "old fables" tell infinitely more of the real truth of things than their sixpenny manuals of chemistry and biology; nay, that the whole effect of the one is Truth, and that the whole effect of the other is Lies—they will remain uneducated, in spite of their manuals, or rather, because of them. ”

“ Poor boys who are sensible make haste to forget the farrago of useless information that they have been compelled to acquire, and devote themselves to their craft, whatever it may be, with such relaxations as street-gambling for halfpence and an interest in "all the winners" to make life endurable. ”

“ It is not so easy—it is very difficult indeed—to eliminate the poisonous stream of cant, humbug, lies, and devil-worship which is injected day after day into the wretched inmates of these public schools. ”

“ EDUCATION AND THE UNEDUCATED It is hardly possible to read the newspaper for many weeks in succession without being confronted by some delightful remarks about the older universities and their system. ”

“ It is bad enough that two hundred and fifty pounds may be spent yearly for eight or nine years in the manufacture of the Uninstructed Booby; it is much worse that the system, not content with this mainly negative result, imparts grace to the boys, enabling them to become Offensive Bounders, persons from whom all the generous, noble, and compassionate impulses which become generosi are entirely missing. ”

“ A man not only went to the theatre and heard the Œdipus, not only listened to the story of the Wanderings of Ulysses, not only heard the Fairy History of Herodotus declaimed: he lived in a land undefiled by the devil temples called factories ”

“ It is not that these little books are technically incorrect—they are probably quite truthful as far as they go, or till next year or so, when their theories, such as they are, will be entirely overturned by some new discovery. They would be quite useful little books if those into whose hands they fell understood that they were merely the fanciful and pleasing dreams of "scientific" men about the appearances and outside skirts of the universe ”