It is not assuredly--and nobody has ever maintained this proposition-- that well-directed instruction may not give very useful practical results, if not in the sense of raising the standard of morality, at least in that of developing professional capacity.Unfortunately the Latin peoples, especially in the last twenty-five years, have based their systems of instruction on very erroneous principles, and in spite of the observations of the most eminent minds, such as Breal, Fustel de Coulanges, Taine, and many others, they persist in their lamentable mistakes.I have myself shown, in a work published some time ago, that the French system of education transforms the majority of those who have undergone it into enemies of society, and recruits numerous disciples for the worst forms of socialism.
The primary danger of this system of education--very properly qualified as Latin--consists in the fact that it is based on the fundamental psychological error that the intelligence is developed by the learning by heart of text-books.Adopting this view, the endeavour has been made to enforce a knowledge of as many hand-books as possible.From the primary school till he leaves the university a young man does nothing but acquire books by heart without his judgment or personal initiative being ever called into play.Education consists for him in reciting by heart and obeying.
"Learning lessons, knowing by heart a grammar or a compendium, repeating well and imitating well--that," writes a former Minister of Public Instruction, M.Jules Simon, "is a ludicrous form of education whose every effort is an act of faith tacitly admitting the infallibility of the master, and whose only results are a belittling of ourselves and a rendering of us impotent."Were this education merely useless, one might confine one's self to expressing compassion for the unhappy children who, instead of making needful studies at the primary school, are instructed in the genealogy of the sons of Clotaire, the conflicts between Neustria and Austrasia, or zoological classifications.But the system presents a far more serious danger.It gives those who have been submitted to it a violent dislike to the state of life in which they were born, and an intense desire to escape from it.
The working man no longer wishes to remain a working man, or the peasant to continue a peasant, while the most humble members of the middle classes admit of no possible career for their sons except that of State-paid functionaries.Instead of preparing men for life French schools solely prepare them to occupy public functions, in which success can be attained without any necessity for self-direction or the exhibition of the least glimmer of personal initiative.At the bottom of the social ladder the system creates an army of proletarians discontented with their lot and always ready to revolt, while at the summit it brings into being a frivolous bourgeoisie, at once sceptical and credulous, having a superstitious confidence in the State, whom it regards as a sort of Providence, but without forgetting to display towards it a ceaseless hostility, always laying its own faults to the door of the Government, and incapable of the least enterprise without the intervention of the authorities.
The State, which manufactures by dint of textbooks all these persons possessing diplomas, can only utilise a small number of them, and is forced to leave the others without employment.It is obliged in consequence to resign itself to feeding the first mentioned and to having the others as its enemies.From the top to the bottom of the social pyramid, from the humblest clerk to the professor and the prefect, the immense mass of persons boasting diplomas besiege the professions.While a business man has the greatest difficulty in finding an agent to represent him in the colonies, thousands of candidates solicit the most modest official posts.There are 20,000 schoolmasters and mistresses without employment in the department of the Seine alone, all of them persons who, disdaining the fields or the workshops, look to the State for their livelihood.The number of the chosen being restricted, that of the discontented is perforce immense.The latter are ready for any revolution, whoever be its chiefs and whatever the goal they aim at.The acquisition of knowledge for which no use can be found is a sure method of driving a man to revolt.[11]
[11] This phenomenon, moreover, is not peculiar to the Latin peoples.It is also to be observed in China, which is also a country in the hands of a solid hierarchy of mandarins or functionaries, and where a function is obtained, as in France, by competitive examination, in which the only test is the imperturbable recitation of bulky manuals.The army of educated persons without employment is considered in China at the present day as a veritable national calamity.It is the same in India where, since the English have opened schools, not for educating purposes, as is the case in England itself, but simply to furnish the indigenous inhabitants with instruction, there has been formed a special class of educated persons, the Baboos, who, when they do not obtain employment, become the irreconcilable enemies of the English rule.In the case of all the Baboos, whether provided with employment or not, the first effect of their instruction has been to lower their standard of morality.This is a fact on which I have insisted at length in my book, "The Civilisations of India"--a fact, too, which has been observed by all authors who have visited the great peninsula.
