[Footnote 23: This I have demonstrated with sufficient detail elsewhere. See my _Defence of Aristocracy_, Chapter IV.] [p126] CHAPTER VI EDUCATION “A city can be virtuous only when the citizens who have a share in the government are virtuous, and in our state all the citizens share in the government.”--Aristotle (Politics. Bk. VII., 13). Education, as organised by the state, can have but one object--the rearing of people who are fit to be decent and worthy citizens. A man may educate himself privately in vice, in jazzing, in motoring, or in crime; he is at liberty to do this at his own expense and in his own time; but if he is educated at the expense of his fellow-men, the intention of these fellow-men must be to train him into a desirable member of society. Only thus can the huge outlay be made worth while. Now a desirable citizen is above all a well conducted citizen. He may know French and fencing, and be able to beat all comers at billiards or biology, marbles or mathematics; but he is only a nuisance if he is not, in addition, well conducted--that is to say, reliable, sensible, understanding, and honest. It is more important that he should thoroughly grasp the first principles of sound conduct and thought, than that he should know the whole of counterpoint or conchology. When once he has mastered the first principles of sound conduct and thought, he is prepared to do well at anything, according [p127] to his gifts; whereas the most exhaustive knowledge of counterpoint and conchology will, in the most favourable circumstances, only make him a good musician or a good classifier of shells. In short, happiness and harmony are more easily achieved by a people holding deep and sound views concerning Life and Humanity, than by people deeply versed in science, and top-heavy with information. Happiness has been achieved again and again upon earth by people possessing not a billionth part of the knowledge that has been accumulated by modern man. A sound instinct in regard to food, a correct understanding of one’s self and one’s fellows and a decent appreciation of the limits of individual caprice in a social community, are, after all, more precious than a large accumulation of facts. And thus education, if it is to be valuable, should consist very much more in a training in manners, sound views, and means of intercourse, than in the acquisition of knowledge about facts.[24] All adults know how very few of the facts they learned at school are ever remembered in later life, and how only those elements of the scholastic curriculum are turned to practical account, or even remembered, which come into daily use throughout life. Thus, a boy of the working classes may remember a little elementary arithmetic and a little geography--apart from that, all he recalls is the trick of reading, because he practises it every day of the year.