"My Visit to Tolstoy": Five DiscoursesKrauskopf, Joseph
Religion
"My Visit to Tolstoy": Five Discourses
Krauskopf, Joseph
Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910
He blamed the schools for many of the errors that obtain in society,
and claimed that there was too much education of the wrong kind, and
too little of the right. In discussing this statement of his, I chanced
to mention that education in the lower grades was compulsory with us.
To this he strongly objected. All compulsion, he said, was wrong. Man
must be gotten to do right by the law of love and not by the rule of
force. Upon my telling him that but for compulsory education some
parents would never send their children to school, he said: "What of
it? The children would probably be no less moral and no less happy
than those of highest education. I have associated with the learned
and the ignorant, and I have found more honor and honesty, more fear
of the Lord and more true happiness, among the unlettered than among
the lettered. The more of education we cram into the heads of the
people the more of the fear of God is crowded out of them. The world
lives by the love of God and not by the primer or the multiplication
table." "What, if you had had no education?" I ventured to ask. Quickly
and feelingly came the answer "The world would have been none the
worse, and I would have been the happier." "What if Jesus and the other
prophets had had no schooling?" I asked. To which he replied "It was
not what they got out of their schools that made them the spiritual and
moral powers they became, but what they got out of their hearts. God
puts more education into the human heart than man has ever been able to
put into the head. Some of the wisest and best people hereabouts are
peasants who have never seen the inside of a school, and who do not
know one letter from another." "What of Paul," I asked, "who certainly
enjoyed the benefits of the Greek schools of his day?" To which he
replied "The schools made of Paul a theologian, and Christianity would
have been the better without the theology of Paul."
Warped by unfavorable
surroundings.
Other objections to some of his paradoxical views on education
suggested themselves to me, but I left them unsaid. I perceived that
while tolerant of objections, his opinions were fixed. He apparently
judged of world-conditions from the view-point of his limited and
unfavorable horizon. Under different conditions, some of his opinions
on education, and on a number of other subjects which we discussed,
would probably have been quite different.
Well informed of
political and social
conditions in United
States.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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