An Essay on the Evils of Popular IgnoranceFoster, John
Philosophy
An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance
Foster, John
Education; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Literacy; Missions -- India; Religious education
the measure of knowledge and mental power requisite as one most essential
constituent of their superiority, in order to command the unfeigned
deference of their inferiors?
Our strenuous promoters of the schemes for cultivating the minds of all
the people, are not afraid of professing to foresee, that when schools, of
that completely disciplinarian organization which they are, we hope,
gradually to attain, shall have become general, and shall be vigorously
seconded by all those auxiliary expedients for popular instruction which
are also in progress, a very pleasing modification will become apparent in
the character, the moral color, if we might so express it, of the people's
ordinary employment. The young persons so instructed, being appointed, for
the most part, to the same occupations to which they would have been
destined had they grown up in utter ignorance and vulgarity, are expected
to give evidence that the meanness, the debasement almost, which had
characterized many of those occupations in the view of the more refined
classes, was in truth the debasement of the men more than of the callings;
which will come to be in more honorable estimation as associated with the
sense, decorum, and self-respect of the performers, than they were while
blended and polluted with all the low habits, manners, and language, of
ignorance and vulgar grossness. And besides, there is the consideration of
the different degrees of merit in the performance itself; and who will be
the persons most likely to excel, in the many branches of workmanship and
business which admit of being better done in proportion to the degree of
intelligence directed upon them? And again, who will be most in
requisition for those offices of management and superintendence, where
something must be confided to judgment and discretion, and where the value
is felt, (often vexatiously felt from the want,) of some capacity of
combination and foresight?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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