Now if brighter days are to be in store for India official or non-official, English or native, all this must be altered. The whole principles of education must be revised or abandoned. The less educated a man is now the more real understanding he is likely to have. The educated man is a mental automaton. He has sold his soul and got in its place some maxims, with the aid of which he seeks to govern the world. He thinks knowledge is got from books. It is not. Books are most valuable helps, showing you new views of life, giving you new facts, showing you how to think; but they never give you knowledge of life. Only experience can do that. But the young man now does not want to know what is, but what other people say. He is afraid of himself and yearns for authority. This has been evident to all who have looked into the matter. Here is what a modern writer says: "No English schoolboy is ever taught to speak the truth for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the truth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless as to whether a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the 'fact' can be used on his side when he is engaged in 'playing the game.'" Nothing could be more true than this. He is provided with fixed ideas, and he will welcome any fact that supports them, while deliberately refusing all facts which are opposed to his ideas. He thinks and argues to prove his preconceived point, never to elicit truth regardless of whether that truth agrees with his preconceptions or not. In fact, he is taught not to think. The Inward Light which is in all children has been put out. He has become a spiritual coward; he dare not look the whole truth in the face. He thinks that patriotism consists in supporting his country or his class through thick and thin. It does not occur to him that the higher patriotism is to try to help his country or his class not to go wrong, or if wrong to get right. He would rather bolster up a mistake, shut his eyes to the fact that it is a mistake, and go on doing it, than admit his wrong. It is better in his eyes to be consistently wrong than by admitting mistakes and correcting them to be inconsistent. He cannot learn. CHAPTER IV HIS SUBSEQUENT TRAINING Therefore there is a wide difference between the men as they came out in the old days and as they come out now. Then they were young, not very well instructed but capable of seeing, understanding, and learning; nowadays they are so drilled and instructed that they can deal only with books, papers, and records; life has been closed to them; they can enforce laws, but not temper them.