Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne: Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of WorkRuskin, John
Philosophy
Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne: Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work
Ruskin, John
Social sciences; Working class -- Great Britain
Therefore, first teach--as I have said in the preface to 'Unto this
Last'--"The Laws of Health, and exercises enjoined by them;" and, to
this end, your schools must be in fresh country, and amidst fresh air,
and have great extents of land attached to them in permanent estate.
Riding, running, all the honest, personal exercises of offense and
defense, and music, should be the primal heads of this bodily
education.
96. Next to these bodily accomplishments, the two great mental graces
should be taught, Reverence and Compassion: not that these are in a
literal sense to be "taught," for they are innate in every well-born
human creature, but they have to be developed exactly as the strength
of the body must be, by deliberate and constant exercise. I never
understood why Goethe (in the plan of education in 'Wilhelm Meister')
says that reverence is not innate, but must be taught from without; it
seems to me so fixedly a function of the human spirit, that if men can
get nothing else to reverence they will worship a fool, or a stone, or
a vegetable.[A] But to teach reverence rightly is to attach it to the
right persons and things; first, by setting over your youth masters
whom they cannot but love and respect; next, by gathering for them,
out of past history, whatever has been most worthy in human deeds and
human passion; and leading them continually to dwell upon such
instances, making this the principal element of emotional excitement
to them; and, lastly, by letting them justly feel, as far as may be,
the smallness of their own powers and knowledge, as compared with the
attainments of others.
[A] By steady preaching against it, one may quench reverence,
and bring insolence to its height; but the instinct cannot be
wholly uprooted.
97. Compassion, on the other hand, is to be taught chiefly by making
it a point of honor, collaterally with courage, and in the same rank
(as indeed the complement and evidence of courage), so that, in the
code of unwritten school law, it shall be held as shameful to have
done a cruel thing as a cowardly one. All infliction of pain on weaker
creatures is to be stigmatized as unmanly crime; and every possible
opportunity taken to exercise the youths in offices of some practical
help, and to acquaint them with the realities of the distress which,
in the joyfulness of entering into life, it is so difficult, for those
who have not seen home suffering, to conceive.
98. Reverence, then, and compassion, we are to teach primarily, and
with these, as the bond and guardian of them, truth of spirit and
word, of thought and sight. Truth, earnest and passionate, sought for
like a treasure, and kept like a crown.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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