on education, when I listen to the talk of
educational theorists, when I see syllabuses and schedules, schemes and
curricula, a great depression settles on my mind; I feel I have no
interest in education, and a deep distrust of theoretical methods.
These things seem to aim at missing the very thing of which we are in
search, and to lose themselves in a sort of childish game, a
marshalling of processions, a lust for organisation. I care so
intensely for what it all means, I loathe so deeply the motives that
seem at work. I suppose that the ordinary man considers a species of
success, a bettering of himself, the acquisition of money and position
and respectability, to be the end of life; and such as these look upon
education primarily as a means of arriving at their object. Such was
the old education given by the sophists, which aimed at turning out a
well-balanced, effective man. But all this, it seems to me, has the
wrong end in view. The success of it depends upon the fact that every
one is not so capable of rising, that the rank and file must be in the
background, forming the material out of which the successful man makes
his combinations, and whom he contrives to despoil.

The result of it is that the well-educated man becomes hard, brisk,
complacent, contemptuous, knowing his own worth, using his equipment
for precise and definite ends.

My idea would rather be that education should aim at teaching people
how to be happy without success; because the shadow of success is
vulgarity, and vulgarity is the one thing which education ought to
extinguish. What I desire is that men should learn to see what is
beautiful, to find pleasure in homely work, to fill leisure with
innocent enjoyment. If education, as the term is generally used, were
widely and universally successful, the whole fabric of a nation would
collapse, because no one thus educated would acquiesce in the
performance of humble work. It is commonly said that education ought to
make men dissatisfied, and teach them to desire to improve their
position. It is a pestilent heresy. It ought to teach them to be
satisfied with simple conditions, and to improve themselves rather than
their position--the end of it ought to be to produce content. Suppose,
for an instant--it sounds a fantastic hypothesis--that a man born in
the country, in the labouring class, were fond of field-work, a lover
of the sights of nature in all her aspects, fond of good literature,
why shoul