GREATEST MISERY OF THE GREATEST NUMBER

It is now time to consider the effect of this system of compulsory
education upon the masses of the people. In the first two chapters an
attempt was made to sketch some of the anomalies brought about by the
educational methods of our public schools and universities, and by the
pernicious system of public competitive examinations. We will now turn
our attention exclusively to the masses, and endeavour to see what
national instruction does for them.

The common people labour under the delusion that children who have
passed the standards of an elementary school are educated. They have
been fitted, according to the popular belief, for a superior station in
life. The first ambition of parents is, therefore, for their child to
obtain a post suitable to its supposed scholarship.

Of course, the truth is, as we all know, that the product of the public
elementary school is utterly useless, and generally wanting in
intelligence. But these facts are only discovered by the victims
themselves after years of bitter experience. Totally unfitted for any
station in life, many of them leave school full of self-confidence in
the belief that their superior education will secure them a good
opening. Despising all manual labour, they seek situations as clerks,
shop-assistants, and such-like. The result is, of course, an over-supply
of candidates for employment of this kind. In consequence, the girls
have to fall back upon domestic service; while the boys swell the ranks
of unskilled labourers and unemployed loafers, or, worse still, betake
themselves to a life of dishonesty.

Nowhere are the evil effects of this education system more strikingly
illustrated than in the country districts. The children of agricultural
labourers and small farmers are given instruction which will be of no
earthly use to them in the occupation for which they are naturally
fitted. Instead of being prepared for country pursuits, they are given
an inferior type of all-round education which is equally useless
everywhere. When they leave school they can read, write, add, subtract,
divide, and multiply--after a fashion; they can mispronounce a few
French words, without being able to construct a single grammatical
sentence or understand a syllable that is said to them; they know enough
shorthand to write down simple words at one half the speed of ordinary
handwriting; and they have acquired by rote a few dry facts from history