an acute person will ask me why, if this be so, our false education
does not provoke our scholars to find out the truth. My answer is that
it sometimes does. Voltaire was a pupil of the Jesuits; Samuel Butler
was the pupil of a hopelessly conventional and erroneous country parson.
But then Voltaire was Voltaire, and Butler was Butler: that is, their
minds were so abnormally strong that they could throw off the doses of
poison that paralyse ordinary minds. When the doctors inoculate you and
the homeopathists dose you, they give you an infinitesimally attenuated
dose. If they gave you the virus at full strength it would overcome your
resistance and produce its direct effect. The doses of false doctrine
given at public schools and universities are so big that they overwhelm
the resistance that a tiny dose would provoke. The normal student is
corrupted beyond redemption, and will drive the genius who resists out
of the country if he can. Byron and Shelley had to fly to Italy, whilst
Castlereagh and Eldon ruled the roost at home. Rousseau was hunted from
frontier to frontier; Karl Marx starved in exile in a Soho lodging;
Ruskin's articles were refused by the magazines (he was too rich to be
otherwise persecuted); whilst mindless forgotten nonentities governed
the land; sent men to the prison or the gallows for blasphemy and
sedition (meaning the truth about Church and State); and sedulously
stored up the social disease and corruption which explode from time to
time in gigantic boils that have to be lanced by a million bayonets.
This is the result of allopathic education. Homeopathic education has
not yet been officially tried, and would obviously be a delicate
matter if it were. A body of schoolmasters inciting their pupils to
infinitesimal peccadilloes with the object of provoking them to exclaim,
'Get thee behind me, Satan,' or telling them white lies about history
for the sake of being contradicted, insulted, and refuted, would
certainly do less harm than our present educational allopaths do; but
then nobody will advocate homeopathic education. Allopathy has produced
the poisonous illusion that it enlightens instead of darkening. The
suggestion may, however, explain why, whilst most people's minds succumb
to inculcation and environment, a few react vigorously: honest and
decent people coming from thievish slums, and sceptics and realists from
country parsonages.

THE DIABOLICAL EFFICIENCY OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION

But me