the disadvantages of our classical education, although it
produced nothing but discontented men, and men unfitted for their
station in life, did the superficial acquisition of so much
knowledge, the faultless repeating by heart of so many
text-books, raise the level of intelligence. But does it really
raise this level? Alas, no! The conditions of success in life
are the possession of judgment, experience, initiative, and
character--qualities which are not bestowed by books. Books are
dictionaries, which it is useful to consult, but of which it is
perfectly useless to have lengthy portions in one's head.
How is it possible for professional instruction to develop the
intelligence in a measure quite beyond the reach of classical
instruction? This has been well shown by M. Taine.
"Ideas, he says, are only formed in their natural and normal
surroundings; the promotion of the growth is effected by the
innumerable impressions appealing to the senses which a young man
receives daily in the workshop, the mine, the law court, the
study, the builder's yard, the hospital; at the sight of tools,
materials, and operations; in the presence of customers, workers,
and labour, of work well or ill done, costly or lucrative. In
such a way are obtained those trifling perceptions of detail of
the eyes, the ear, the hands, and even the sense of smell, which,
picked up involuntarily, and silently elaborated, take shape
within the learner, and suggest to him sooner or, later this or
that new combination, simplification, economy, improvement, or
invention. The young Frenchman is deprived, and precisely at the
age when they are most fruitful, of all these precious contacts,
of all these indispensable elements of assimilation. For seven
or eight years on end he is shut up in a school, and is cut off
from that direct personal experience which would give him a keen
and exact notion of men and things and of the various ways of
handling them."
" . . . At least nine out of ten have wasted their time and pains
during several years of their life--telling, important, even
decisive years. Among such are to be counted, first of all, the
half or two-thirds of those who present themselves for
examination--I refer to those who are rejected; and then among
those who are successful, who obtain a degree, a certificate, a
diploma, there is still a half or two-thirds--I refer to the
overworked. Too much has been demanded of them by exacting that
on a given day, on a chair or before a board, they should, for
two hours in succession, and with respect to a group of sciences,
be living repertories of all human knowledge. In point of fact
they were that, or nearly so, for two hours on that particular
day, but a month later they are so no longer. They could not go
through the examination again. Their too numerous and too
burdensome acquisitions slip incessantly from their mind, and are
not replaced. Their mental vigour has declined, their fertile
capacity for growth has dried up, the fully-developed man
appears, and he is often a used-up man. Settled down, married,
resigned to turning in a circle, and indefinitely in the same
circle, he shuts himself up in his confined function, which he
fulfils adequately, but nothing more. Such is the average yield:
assuredly the receipts do not balance the expenditure. In
England or America, where, as in France previous to 1789, the