It is not a question whether one order
of study or another should predominate. It is a question of what
topics of education you shall select which will combine all the needful
elements in such due proportion as to give the greatest amount of
food, support, and encouragement to those faculties which enable us to
appreciate truth, and to profit by those sources of innocent happiness
which are open to us, and, at the same time, to avoid that which is bad,
and coarse, and ugly, and keep clear of the multitude of pitfalls and
dangers which beset those who break through the natural or moral laws.
I address myself, in this spirit, to the consideration of the question
of the value of purely literary education. Is it good and sufficient, or
is it insufficient and bad? Well, here I venture to say that there are
literary educations and literary educations. If I am to understand
by that term the education that was current in the great majority of
middle-class schools, and upper schools too, in this country when I was
a boy, and which consisted absolutely and almost entirely in keeping
boys for eight or ten years at learning the rules of Latin and Greek
grammar, construing certain Latin and Greek authors, and possibly making
verses which, had they been English verses, would have been condemned
as abominable doggerel,--if that is what you mean by liberal education,
then I say it is scandalously insufficient and almost worthless.
Pages:
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134