Education; Priestley, Joseph, 1733-1804; Science -- Study and teaching
Then with respect to aesthetic knowledge and discipline, we have
happily in the English language one of the most magnificent storehouses
of artistic beauty and of models of literary excellence which exists in
the world at the present time. I have said before, and I repeat it
here, that if a man cannot get literary culture of the highest kind out
of his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and
Bishop Berkeley, to mention only a few of our illustrious writers--I
say, if he cannot get it out of those writers, he cannot get it out of
anything; and I would assuredly devote a very large portion of the time
of every English child to the careful study of the models of English
writing of such varied and wonderful kind as we possess, and, what is
still more important and still more neglected, the habit of using that
language with precision, with force, and with art. I fancy we are
almost the only nation in the world who seem to think that composition
comes by nature. The French attend to their own language, the Germans
study theirs; but Englishmen do not seem to think it is worth their
while. Nor would I fail to include, in the course of study I am
sketching, translations of all the best works of antiquity, or of the
modern world. It is a very desirable thing to read Homer in Greek; but
if you don't happen to know Greek, the next best thing we can do is to
read as good a translation of it as we have recently been furnished
with in prose. You won't get all you would get from the original, but
you may get a great deal; and to refuse to know this great deal because
you cannot get all, seems to be as sensible as for a hungry man to
refuse bread because he cannot get partridge. Finally, I would add
instruction in either music or painting, or, if the child should be so
unhappy, as sometimes happens, as to have no faculty for either of
those, and no possibility of doing anything in any artistic sense with
them, then I would see what could be done with literature alone; but I
would provide, in the fullest sense, for the development of the
aesthetic side of the mind. In my judgment, those are all the
essentials of education for an English child. With that outfit, such as
it might be made in the time given to education which is within the
reach of nine-tenths of the population--with that outfit, an
Englishman, within the limits of English life, is fitted to go
anywhere, to occupy the highest positions, to fill the highest offices
of the State, and to become distinguished in practical pursuits, in
science, or in art. For, if he have the opportunity to learn all those
things, and have his mind disciplined in the various directions the
teaching of those topics would have necessitated, then, assuredly, he
will be able to pick up, on his road through life, all the rest of the
intellectual baggage he wants.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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