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

Absurdities of Modern Education.
ing its vision upon the dim and shadowy future, and it will
inevitably be radical in the worst sense of the term, disorganizing, destructive, individualizing, truly unfraternal with all its
pretensions to the contrary, ever cherishing jealousies in regard
to personal rights and social distinctions, and, therefore, amid
all its boasts of progress in the physical and material, actually
tending to a degeneracy both of the intellectual and the moral
nature.
It may be said, too, of education regarded under the first of
these aspects, that whilst it brings out the humanity, it at the
same time more distinctly developes the higher and stronger
individual characteristics than the opposite course, although the
latter makes this last result one of its loudest boasts. We
often hear it said that the worth of the individual man has but
just now been discovered and acknowledged; heretofore he was
regarded only in conniexion with his race, or as a member of
the State or of the Church. This, it has been alleged, is brought
about mainly by these new views of education, which refuse a
servile submission to authority, which teach every man to think
for himself, and be the'"former of his own intellectual character."
Let it however be tested at once by an appeal to the facts of
human history. When have the individual strength, and characteristics, and power for good, been most strongly developed?
under that view of culture which magnifies the claims and rights
of the private man and of the private mind regarded by itself,
or that which attaches importance to it mainly in its relations
to the common institutions of humanity? Under which view is
man more truly elevated? Which confers upon him a more real
dignity that which regards him as a fragment of a mass, each
separate segment of which is striving to individualize itself, or
that which treats him as a living member of a living organism,
from whence is derived, not only the utilitarian value of each
member, but also its distinct individuality as a part, and aside
from which it becomes dead, and worthless, and nameless, as a
severed limb, when taken out of its relation of membership to a
living body? Again, under what circumstances, and at what
periods, may we expect more of a mediocre sameness, than
when the age is every where boasting of this very tendency to
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