Autobiography and Selected EssaysHuxley, Thomas Henry
Science
Autobiography and Selected Essays
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
But, you will say, all this is fault-finding; let us hear what you have
in the way of positive suggestion. Then I am bound to tell you that,
if I could make a clean sweep of everything--I am very glad I cannot
because I might, and probably should, make mistakes,--but if I could
make a clean sweep of everything and start afresh, I should, in the
first place, secure that training of the young in reading and writing,
and in the habit of attention and observation, both to that which is
told them, and that which they see, which everybody agrees to. But in
addition to that, I should make it absolutely necessary for everybody,
for a longer or shorter period, to learn to draw. Now, you may say,
there are some people who cannot draw, however much they may be taught.
I deny that in toto, because I never yet met with anybody who could not
learn to write. Writing is a form of drawing; therefore if you give the
same attention and trouble to drawing as you do to writing, depend upon
it, there is nobody who cannot be made to draw, more or less well.
Do not misapprehend me. I do not say for one moment you would make an
artistic draughtsman. Artists are not made; they grow. You may improve
the natural faculty in that direction, but you cannot make it; but you
can teach simple drawing, and you will find it an implement of learning
of extreme value. I do not think its value can be exaggerated, because
it gives you the means of training the young in attention and accuracy,
which are the two things in which all mankind are more deficient than in
any other mental quality whatever. The whole of my life has been spent
in trying to give my proper attention to things and to be accurate, and
I have not succeeded as well as I could wish; and other people, I am
afraid, are not much more fortunate. You cannot begin this habit too
early, and I consider there is nothing of so great a value as the habit
of drawing, to secure those two desirable ends.
Then we come to the subject-matter, whether scientific or aesthetic, of
education, and I should naturally have no question at all about teaching
the elements of physical science of the kind I have sketched, in a
practical manner; but among scientific topics, using the word scientific
in the broadest sense, I would also include the elements of the theory
of morals and of that of political and social life, which, strangely
enough, it never seems to occur to anybody to teach a child. I would
have the history of our own country, and of all the influences which
have been brought to bear upon it, with incidental geography, not as
a mere chronicle of reigns and battles, but as a chapter in the
development of the race, and the history of civilisation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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