Latin, French, geography, science, history, composition,
and a dozen other branches of knowledge, in order to develop a taste for
sensational rags, middle-class magazines, and inferior fiction.

If the process were coupled with no worse consequences than this, nobody
of the least pretension to culture would wish to see it continued
another day. But we have seen that the mischief goes far beyond mere
superficiality and bad taste. It carries its pernicious influence into
every social problem by which modern statesmen are perplexed and
harassed. From the housing question to the dearth of servants we feel
its baneful effects. And as if it were not enough to have unfitted the
masses of the people for the occupations best suited to the great bulk
of them, to have instilled into the minds of working-men's children, by
means of illiterate Shakespeare recitations and burlesque efforts to
grasp geography, a contempt for the skilled labour of the artisan--this
education process has brought about a general deterioration in the
manners of the lower classes that has long been a subject of general
complaint.

Nobody wishes to see the common people in a constant attitude of
servility towards the classes above them. To thinking people nothing is
more painful than to observe such signs of a want of proper self-respect
and independence on the part of freeborn men and women of whatever
standing in the social scale. But it is a significant fact that
educating the masses, in the sense in which that term seems to be
generally employed, has had the effect of eradicating from them all
respect for education. The educated man of real attainments is not
looked up to in the smallest degree by the average individual of the
lower orders. It would be useless to quote, in support of a statement
made in the presence of unexceptional members of the working classes,
the opinion of any recognised authority. For the matter of that, there
are many persons of a higher rank who are supposed to have enjoyed the
benefits of a more liberal type of education than that afforded by the
elementary school, who are equally unimpressed by the value of expert
knowledge.

Whether it is that State-educated youths think that their
accomplishments have made them the equals of everybody else, or whether
the inanity of the system to which they have been subjected has given
them a contempt for learning, it would be difficult to determine.
Probably both misconceptions are ev