What Is and What Might Be: A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in ParticularHolmes, Edmond
Philosophy
What Is and What Might Be: A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular
Holmes, Edmond
Education
And, like the pests that assail growing plants, the sensual pests
that war against the soul must be beaten off by vigorous and
continuous growth. No other prophylactic is so sure or so effective
as this. When I was asked whether the Utopian education was useful
or not, I adduced, as an instance of its usefulness, its power of
protecting the young from the allurements of a pernicious literature,
to which the victims of the conventional type of education, with
their lowered vitality and their lack of interest in life, too
readily succumb. This is a typical example of the way in which the
rising sap of life strengthens the soul to resist the temptations to
undue sensual indulgence by which it is always liable to be assailed.
The victim of a repressive, growth-arresting type of education,
having few if any interests in life, not infrequently takes to the
meretricious excitements of sensuality in order to relieve the
intolerable monotony of his days. But the training which makes for
many-sided growth, by filling the life of the "adolescent" with many
and various interests, removes temptations of this particular type
from his path. And it does more for him than this. It generates in
him a state of health and well-being, in which the very vigour and
elasticity of his spiritual fibre automatically shields him from
temptation by refusing to allow the germs of moral disease to effect
a lodgment in his soul. It would be well if our moralists could
realise that the chief causes of weakness in the presence of sensual
temptation are, on the one hand, boredom and _ennui_, and on the other
hand flabbiness and degeneracy of spiritual fibre, and that the
remedy for both these defects is to give the young the type of
education which will foster rather than hinder growth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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