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

Absurdities of Modern Education.
may go farther than this, and maintain that they are the very
mnoulds for the casting and formation itself. The mind cannot
think clearly, any more than it can well remember without
them. If this be so, then there can be no true development
without these necessary envelopes previously produced in the
matrix of older and wiser minds, and through which knowledge
is generated and grows from age to age, just as truly and really
as the physical development. Let boys then "think for themselves," but let there be ready these logical swathing bands for
the young and tender ideas, when, according to the true Platonic doctrine, they first experience their outward birth. Without this, they will prove, with rare exceptions, monstrous and
mischievous abortions, or grow up deformed "misshapen things,"
the wayward offspring of an unnatural, and irregular, unscientific introduction into the intellectual world. Clear words and
formulas are as essential to the new-born thought, as air to the
lungs of the new-born infant.
The views we have ventured to condemn have led to the
almost entire rejection of memoriter instruction. It has been
called slavish "parrot-like," learning "by rote," &c. We hear
it often said, to the supposed credit of certain schools, that
their pupils are encouraged to think for themselves, or, according to another famous phrase of the day, to express their ideas
in their own language, as being a much better thing than loading the memory with forms of words prepared for them by
others. Such a style of expression may frequently be met with
in published accounts of committees for school examinations, or
in the inflated prospectus of some ambitious teacher, who wishes
to call the attention of the public to it as a method very peculiar to himself. It is generally thought, too, to convey a severe
condemnation of the opposite system. But there is certainly a
delusion here. We have no desire to defend the manifest abuses,
into which memoriter instruction, unless great pains are taken
to guard against it, may naturally fall; yet still we must repeat
the conviction, a conviction derived far more from experience
than from theory, that there is, somehow, a great mistake
about the ultra-opposite view, which is now so popular. It is
not so clear that this unlimited right of private judgment, this
encouraging pupils to think for themselves, and to express their
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