Three Absurdities of Certain Modern Theories of Education [pp. 265-292]

Absurditizes of Modern Education.
his thoughts may have come. If, moreover, he would ever
truly think for himself, with strength and clearness, he must
first be content to think with others through the domain of
what may be called settled science, and established truth. The
other method assumes, or seems to assume, that there is no such
domain. All things are to be taken as yet unsettled and
unknown. It is made a merit in the student that he thus
regards it. All his studies are to proceed upon such a supposition of fancied independence. Other minds have discovered
nothing-at least nothing for him. He is to make his own way
through the wilderness, and this, too, on the modest assumption
that others have failed in finding truth, or, at all events, that
there is no path which he can trust on their authority. Any
such idea would be only a subjecting the mind to trammels, and
an impediment to the freedom of thought. Now, besides the
sham and mockery of all this, the great mischief is, that what
the student starts with as a hypothesis merely, although a very
foolish hypothesis, becomes at length a settled habit of his
mind. He grows up with this wretched conceit of thinking for
himself, and despising all authority; while the continual effort
at independence, or the avoidance of any path marked out by
others, take away all true freedom and enlargement, as well
as all rectitude of thought. In this way, too, the student loses
the invigorating confidence of truth, from the darkening
assumption that it is ever to be discovered, even in its elementary foundations.
When, however, he has really reached this terminus of
settled science, he may, on that very account, with the stronger
faith, launch his boat into the sea of the yet undiscovered and
unknown. The art or science of analysis should, it is true, be
taught as a distinct branch of culture or mental exercise, to be
used when occasion calls for it; but the error complained of
consists in reversing the order of nature, and making it the
universal method in all departments. Youth are encouraged to
be explorers and discoverers before they have learned the foundations of knowledge, or have even ascertained that there are
any such foundations.
Thus in religious teaching, the tendency now is to throw
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