Great Britain -- Social conditions; Moral conditions; Social problems
If we thus eliminate languages and simplify geography and history we
give the modern teacher a more hopeful opportunity. It is surely the
universal experience that we forget nine-tenths of the geographical
details we learn at school, and we find little inconvenience in
re-learning such as we need to master in later years. A judicious
outline-scheme, with more physiography and less of useless detail, and
a fuller account of one's national geography (not because it
describes the child's country, but because it is practical
information) would suffice. The remainder, or part of it, could be
imparted in technical training for commerce. History should be wholly
remodelled. It is ludicrous to-day to make the child grow pale and
worn over the past royal families and wars of England, and dismiss the
general history of the race in a page or two. A fine scheme of the
history, and even the prehistory and origin, of the human race, with
so much fuller information about the child's own country as is
useful for the understanding of its institutions and monuments, could
be imparted in less time, with more interest, and with far greater
profit. The patriotic sham deeply vitiates our scheme of instruction
and makes the training of the child scandalously one-sided and
exacting. Germany has recently shown us the pernicious results of this
political perversion of education.
Passing to the moral education of children, we at once find it cruelly
distorted and enfeebled by a religious sham of the least defensible
nature. Such moralists as Kant and Emerson hardly exaggerated the
human importance of moral law, however much they failed to understand
its human significance. Character is the pivot on which life turns.
The general diffusion of fine qualities of character would transform
the earth, quite apart from economic and political reform, and lead to
a speedier settlement of our industrial and international
difficulties. It is therefore of supreme importance to train the will
or character of the child from its earliest years. Yet there is no
other branch of our education, and hardly any other branch of our
life, in which we tolerate so crude and ludicrous a pretence of work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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