Overeducation

“ How do they fulfill their obligation, those who look after education in the towns? By hindering it! And those who here monopolize education, those who try to mold the mind of youth, to the exclusion of all others whomsoever, how do they carry out their mission? By curtailing knowledge as much as possible, by extinguishing all ardor and enthusiasm, by trampling on all dignity, the soul's only refuge, by inculcating in us worn-out ideas, rancid beliefs, false principles incompatible with a life of progress! ”

“ If there be any truth in the principles held by the enemies of education, this is the most dangerous state in which a country can be placed. They maintain that knowledge renders the poor arrogant and discontented. ”

“ Our young men and women have been blamed for their lack of reverence and their readiness to form conclusions without adequate knowledge or study in the teeth of venerable opinion and convention. Indisputably they have erred in this respect, but indisputably also the fault is now recognized, and is being cured in the curriculum of education. Yet, evil as the fault is, the traits which seem to have nourished it—unwillingness to accept tradition and a searching, honest clearness of vision—are virtues of the first water, and typical of the best national character. ”

“ That is bad enough in itself—but add to cut-and-dried pedagogy the outrageous liberty which modern pupils are permitted in school and college, and add to that the unheard-of luxury in which they live—and the result is stupidity and utter ruin. ”

“ Is it not quite certain that the ordinary elementary schoolmaster will think it not merely natural but simply conscientious to eradicate all these rugged legends of a laborious people, and on principle to preach soap and Socialism against beer and liberty? In the lower classes the school master does not work for the parent, but against the parent. Modern education means handing down the customs of the minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority. ”

“ To take stock of myself mentally is not so easy. I have received the deplorable education of the day. Everything that possibly could be done was done to make me hate the pursuit of knowledge. I am, indeed, an excellent example of the signal failure of American education,—the failure to provide for the utilization of a developed type. My father and my grandfather and his father before him were brought up to public service as the result of a system of society and education which demanded service of them. ”

“ But, amidst all the spread of education, and all the multiplying of schools and colleges, how much is done towards curing the unreason which is the great evil of human life and character to all but the very few who are gifted with a judgment which seems scarcely to need cultivating, but only employment on varied material? The children of educated parents are brought up in and with their parents’ opinions; if they quit those opinions, it is usually to betake themselves to views precisely opposite, and under the influence of prejudices as strong as those of their education. ”

“ If the child has not that home education which, as Plato said, is of all things most valuable, the vicious circle of ignorance is complete. Does that account partly for the past of our educational deficiencies? ”

“ It is now time to consider the effect of this system of compulsory education upon the masses of the people. In the first two chapters an attempt was made to sketch some of the anomalies brought about by the educational methods of our public schools and universities, and by the pernicious system of public competitive examinations. We will now turn our attention exclusively to the masses, and endeavour to see what national instruction does for them.
The common people labour under the delusion that children who have passed the standards of an elementary school are educated. ”

“ Of course, the truth is, as we all know, that the product of the public elementary school is utterly useless, and generally wanting in intelligence. But these facts are only discovered by the victims themselves after years of bitter experience. Totally unfitted for any station in life, many of them leave{36} school full of self-confidence in the belief that their superior education will secure them a good opening. Despising all manual labour, they seek situations as clerks, shop-assistants, and such-like. ”

“ You will wish to have wide, human education for all, in school and out of school; and, seeing that this is impossible in existing conditions, you will attack the very foundations of bourgeois society. ”

“ Thus it happens that the down-trodden of society are also the down-trodden in the school. And we call this justice; and we say that demerit is punished and merit is rewarded; but in this way we make ourselves the sycophants of nature and of social error, and not the administrators of justice in education! ”

“ In this respect it is necessary to blame education systems, institutions, school teachers, tutors, governesses, and parents alike; for all are engaged in keeping up an educational delusion that is working great harm to the world in general.
But when we come to consider the amount of evil produced by each of these factors, it will be seen at once that there is a good deal to choose between them. The private tutor, under present methods of teaching, is in a far better position to encourage the individual development of a child than is the schoolmaster who has the care of a class. ”

“ When they stand not only absolute but clothed with authority, and when they pretend to convince us even against our own experience, they are positively undoing the work which education was meant to do. ”

“ But that our students, and young men in general, usually pass through the school of corruption and drag the filth of the road which they have traversed before marriage along [429] with them throughout life, is not their fault so much as the fault of prejudices and of our political and social conditions that prohibits a proper education, and the placing of the right kind of literature on these subjects into the hands of young people. ”

“ CHAPTER V. EVIL CONSEQUENCES OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM ON THE MALE PORTION OF SOCIETY.
Let us now suppose the young men educated under the present Public School system fairly launched into the world, and, for the first time, thrown on their own resources. They are all well, indeed over-educated. The greater part of their families are necessarily in poor or moderate circumstances. Will their learned and accomplished sons take the humble and laborious trades or occupations of their fathers? I fear not. We should not expect more from human nature than there is in it. ”

“ In short, theory and practice, hand in hand, both prove to the whole world the double error in our system of education. Says theory—if young people, instead of being taught to look at the ground under their feet, at the heavens above their head, or at creation around them, are forced by the rod to study events that never happened, speeches that never were made, metamorphoses that never took place, forms of worship and creeds ridiculous and impious, such a nation must inevitably grow up narrow-minded, ignorant, superstitious, and cruel. ”

“ But be careful to avoid that over-intellectual culture which is purchased at the expense of moral vigor. An observant professor of one of our colleges has remarked that "the mind may be so rounded and polished by education, so well balanced, as not to be energetic in any one faculty. In other men not thus trained, the sense of deficiency and of the sharp, jagged corners of their knowledge leads to efforts to fill up the chasms, rendering them at last far better educated men than the polished, easy-going graduate who has just knowledge enough to prevent consciousness of his ignorance. ”

“ Most young men look on life as a game that is played between themselves and a perfectly ridiculous antiquated body which is called 'government,' and whom it is permissible to hoodwink, misinform, or otherwise deceive whenever the opportunity is presented. [Pg 206] The corroding forces of knowledge must make themselves felt during those six years. It is unreasonable and absurd to attribute their effects solely to the public school system. ”

“ And you men say that you come here to get an education. But what do you really do? You resist education with all your might and main, digging your heels into the gravel of your own ignorance and fighting any attempt to teach you anything every inch of the way. What's worse, you aren't content with your own ignorance; you insist that every one else be ignorant, too. Suppose a man attempts to acquire culture, as some of them do. What happens? He is branded as wet. He is a social leper.
"Wet! What currency that bit of slang has—and what awful power. ”

“ Teach the children its fatal cost in spiritual degradation and murder, teach them that to hate "niggers" or "chinks" is to crucify souls like their own. Is there anything we would accomplish with human beings? Do it with the immortal child, with a stretch of endless time for doing it and with infinite possibilities to work on.
Is this our attitude toward education? It is in England nor America—in France nor Germany—with black nor white nor yellow folk. Education to the modern world is a burden which we are driven to carry. We shirk and complain. ”

“ Education must always be the enemy of tyranny, slavery, and all kinds of abasement.
The grinders’ school was introduced to ridicule the practice of forcing all children in charitable institutions to wear a uniform dress, and to attack corporal punishment, neglect of moral training, and the practice of placing ignorant men in the high position of a teacher. ”

“ He looked forward, indeed, to the time when public establishments for education would become superfluous and even detrimental; but this would only be when right reason prevailed, and it was no longer necessary for the wiser few to labour to destroy the prejudices and mistakes of the ignorant many; when superstition should be no more; and when each man should find in his own knowledge, and in the rectitude of his mind, arms sufficient to combat every species of imposition. ”

“ What the unconscious conspiracy of economic circumstance has done, and what conscious manipulations the Government school is guilty of, to render higher education a privilege of the rich and a maintainer of injustice is another matter. ”

“ Increased knowledge, especially when not adequately accompanied by moral and religious education, will create new tastes, desires, and ambitions, that make for evil as well as for good. Let instruction abound, let education in its fullest sense more abound, but let us be aware of the increased power for evil as well as for good that they produce, and at any rate let us not imagine that education and crime cannot co-exist. ”

“ Perhaps nothing in our present system of education is so demoralizing and unjust as the custom of public examinations. In them interest and vanity play into each other’s hands; genuine acquirement and principle “go to the wall.” The teachers and the boys alike know that they are never true criterions of progress, that they are seldom even fair representations of the actual course of study. Weeks, months are spent in preparations for the deceitful display; even then true merit, which is generally modest by nature, does itself injustice, and vain self-assurance comes off with flying colors. ”

“ Much of the good of society is walled out from the school by barriers that arise in politics, City ways, all the bad life of the streets, the trivial interests of the day, affect the school too much. We are greatly at fault in all this, because we do not take education as yet seriously enough. ”

“ So, in the question of education, the upholders of the Public School system have pushed the false principle "that all individual, domestic, social, and political evils are due to ignorance, and can only be prevented by high intellectual culture," till they have nearly taught away all religious belief and morality, have well-nigh abolished the family which is the social unit, and find that the evils they pretended to prevent, and the wrongs they sought to redress, are fast increasing. ”

“ The ignorance of the lower classes is deplorable; it is the moral duty of those in higher stations, it is the noble task of governments to raise them on the scale of intellect; education cannot be too general, but let it be in the true spirit of education. We are creatures, who depend greatly, perhaps wholly, on instruction. We can in general do little of ourselves. ”

“ The result is that the various vital faculties which education might be supposed to train become irretrievably starved and stunted in the over-educated school child; till at last, when the time comes for him to leave the school in which he has been so sedulously cared for, he is too often thrown out upon the world, helpless, listless, resourceless, without a single interest, without a single purpose in life. ”

“ It is certainly a great misfortune to the nation that a good number of our would-be scientific pedagogues are such mediocrities, with so absurd an exaggeration of their importance that they are well satisfied if the mass of their pupils turn out exact reproductions of the silly pedagogue. What can be expected of a nation that entrusts the fate of its young generation to the care or carelessness of young girls, to the ire of old maids, and to pettifogging officials with their educational red tape, discipline and routine,—petty bureaucrats animated with a hatred towards talent and genius? ”