The man or woman properly educated will desire the right things, and
will seek the right way of attaining these things. His actions will
spring from a real living force within him. But if you teach him to do
things because he is told or because it is the custom, you injure his
personality; and as there is no driving force in a law or a custom,
which are bonds, you confine him, whereas you should free him. It is
an admission that he must not or cannot think for himself, but must
blindly follow custom. It is true that he must, not only in boyhood
but all through his life, yield obedience in act to persons,
governments, or rules; but he must not do so blindly. It is a
principal part of education to make the boy see for himself that such
subordination of act is necessary to the progress of the world, because
as individuals we can accomplish no great thing; then he will do it
willingly, knowing its necessity. But it is equally necessary that the
boy never subordinate his judgment to others, because any rule made
absolute is death to progress, and there is no authority, nor rule, nor
convention that should not be broken sometimes; and as time goes on all
must be modified, changed, and relaxed; the ideal of education being
that all authority will become unnecessary, as people will desire what
is right, and do it _proprio moto_. The truth will have made them free.
Now seeing this difference, how much education is there in school or
college? In the classrooms there is none. All that is given in
classes is instruction, which may be useful or detrimental inasmuch as
it helps personality or not. Usually it is detrimental, because it
substitutes "authority" for insight. The child must accept something,
not because he is helped to see that it is true, but because "somebody
says so." Thus his personality is destroyed.
The only education he gets is in the playing-fields. There he learns
to keep his temper, play the game, and co-operate, of his volition,
with others to a desired end.
That is a valuable training, but it does not go very far. He is never
taught to see life as it is for himself. On the contrary, he is
forbidden to do so.
And this continues now till the age of twenty-two or twenty-three, so
that by the time it is over the most receptive period of life is past.
Bacon went to the University at thirteen, and left it at sixteen as he
found it had no more to teach him.
Further, until some thirty or forty years ago a father considered that
he owed some duty to his son--to help him, to lead him, to initiate him
into life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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