The Curse of Education Part 10

That must always be the case with the self-made man. His first objective must be his own self-preservation, and if he wishes to gain power he is bound to exploit the political situation, regardless of the best interests of the country, because every man's hand is against him until the summit of his ambition has been reached.

Schools and colleges in which the mind is crammed instead of being developed cannot produce statesmen. They can manufacture in unlimited quant.i.ties the type of well-intentioned, honourable mediocrity with which our public service is stocked. But as long as this process is continued, the real power in the administration of the affairs of the Empire will remain virtually in the hands of a few able individuals of the wrong calibre. There will be a dummy Prime Minister, and a dummy Cabinet; but the wires will be worked by the self-made man who must place himself first and his country second, with consequences usually disastrous to the national welfare.

There is no intended disparagement of the self-made man. He is, and always has been, the best intellectual product of the age. The greatest statesmen, philosophers, scientists, writers, and other men of genius have been self-made or self-cultured. But it does not follow because great statesmen have been self-made men, that it is for the good of the country that its rulers should be drawn from that cla.s.s. As has already been pointed out, the self-made man usually creates far more mischief in the course of his upward political struggle, than is compensated for afterwards when he has secured his position and can turn his talents to the account of his country, instead of for the purpose of securing his own personal advancement.

There is, it must be remembered, a national emergency for which we have to prepare. Our extended Imperial obligations, and the sharp commercial compet.i.tion which has caused some of the great Powers to sacrifice individuality wholesale in order to mobilize an army of traders, make it imperative that measures should be taken to preserve the Anglo-Saxon race.

The thing to avoid at this moment is imitation of tactics that will send every nation adopting them backward in evolution. To secure a temporary commercial triumph at the enormous sacrifice of the natural development of the individual, would be a fatal and short-sighted policy that could only end in national ruin. We have not yet reached the worst depths of the education fallacy, but we are complacently drifting in that direction.

State interference in educational matters may be an excellent thing when the whole energies of the central authorities happen to be exerted in mitigation of the evils of the national system. But it must be borne in mind that political parties and the heads of departments are constantly changing in this country. The reformer of to-day may to-morrow be superseded by a retrogressive-minded mediocrity; and there would be no guarantee that the beneficial influence of the one would not be annihilated afterwards by the pernicious intermeddling of the other.

Instead of casting about for means of securing a State monopoly of the ruinous type of education supplied by our schools and colleges, it would be more conducive to the salvation of the country if the whole energies of the nation were directed towards revolutionizing the system of instruction itself.

If schoolmasters can accomplish nothing better than the manufacture of set types of humanity, the progress of mankind would be promoted more rapidly without their a.s.sistance.

What is, after all, the main object of education?

It is to a.s.sist everybody to develop his faculties and talents, so that he may be fitted for the position in life which Nature intended him to occupy.

n.o.body can a.s.sert for an instant that the conventional methods of instructing youth either achieve, or even appear to aim at achieving, this end. The school does not pretend to discover or to encourage individual talents. It offers to pound so much Latin grammar, mathematics, history, geography, etc., into each pupil, and to turn him out at the end of the process with exactly the same mental equipment as that acquired by the rest of his school-fellows.

The princ.i.p.al aim of this book has been to draw attention to the incongruities and evils brought about by this sham and worthless system of education. That the world contains many ill.u.s.trious examples of culture and genius is no proof that the slightest 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 cla.s.s-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 inst.i.tution 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 cla.s.sical or mathematical knowledge for a modic.u.m 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