ifies an enormous number of things, from
pot-hooks to trigonometry. It means history, geography, physics,
chemistry, natural history, mineralogy, Latin, Greek, French,
arithmetic, algebra, Euclid, and goodness knows how many more things,
jammed in at so much a pound. It means taking a child, shaking
everything out of its head, and then stuffing every nook and corner with
facts it will never be able to remember, and with dates for which it
cannot have any use. It means risking the mental shipwreck of the clever
child, and making the stupid more dense. And it means popping the
individual into a mould, and dishing him up as a dummy.

What it does not mean, is developing the faculties of each individual.

There is, in fact, a wide difference between what education is and what
it should be. If every school and college throughout the country were
closed to-morrow, it would probably effect some negative good within an
appreciable measure of time, and it would certainly abolish much
positive harm that is being unceasingly produced by the present methods
of instruction. If no effort be made to develop the faculties of each
individual, then it is better to leave them alone to develop on their
own account. But nothing can be more pernicious than to take the youth
of the nation wholesale, and to destroy most of the good that is latent
in them, in order to manufacture them into something which Nature never
intended them to be.

This is not education, but fabrication. It is destruction, not
development. Real education would consist in assisting every individual
to develop the faculties with which Nature had endowed him, and to train
to their highest capacity any special talents that might reveal
themselves during the process. Above all things, real education would
encourage the utilization of the brain for purposes of thought and
reflection, instead of trying to make it a warehouse for storing
van-loads of useless knowledge.

It is absurd to assume that this simple educational aim is beyond the
reach of humanity. That its introduction into the practical affairs of
life would cause a stupendous revolution cannot be denied. But it does
not follow, on that account, that it should be conveniently consigned,
like many another pressing reform, to the pigeon-hole of the impossible.

The main thing that is required to carry out the true principle of
education is more individual common sense and less State interference.
The mischievous e