EDUCATION AS DISTINGUISHED FROM LEARNING.
Although not the same kind, there is as much difference between
education and learning, as there is between character and
reputation.
Learning may be regarded as mental capital, in the way of accumulated
facts. Education is the drawing out and development of the best that
is in the heart, the head, and the hand.
The civilized world has a score of very learned men, to the one who
may be said to be thoroughly educated. The learned man may be
familiar with many languages, and sciences, and have all the facts
of history and literature at his fingers' tip, and yet be as
helpless as an infant and as impractical as a fool. An educated man,
a man with his powers developed by training, may know no language
but his mother tongue, may be ignorant as to literature and art, and
yet be well--yes, even superbly educated.
The learned man's mind may be likened to a store house, or magazine,
in which there are a thousand wonderful things, some of which he can
make of use in the battle of life. He resembles the miser who fills
his coffers with gold and keeps it out of circulation. Beyond the
selfish joy of possession, his wealth is worthless, and its
acquisition has unfitted him for the struggle. The educated man, to
continue the illustration, may not be rich, but he knows how to use
every cent he owns, and he places it where, under his energy, it
will grow into dollars.
Far be it from us to underestimate the value of learning. Many of the
world's greatest men have been learned, but without exception such
men have also been educated. They have been trained to make their
knowledge available for the benefit of themselves and their fellow
men.
The athlete who develops his muscles to their greatest capacity of
strength and flexibility, and this can only be done by observing
strictly the laws of health, is physically an educated man. Every
mechanic whose hands and brain have been trained to the expertness
required by the master workman, is well-educated in his particular
calling. The man who is an expert accountant, or a trained civil
engineer, may know nothing of the higher mathematical principles,
but he is better educated than the scholar who has only a
theoretical knowledge of all the mathematics that have ever been
published.
The educated man is the man who can do something, and the quality of
his work marks the degree of his education. One might be learned in
law in a phenomenal way, and yet, unless he was educated, trained to
the practice, he would be beaten in the preparation of a case by a
lawyer's clerk.
There are men who can write and talk learnedly on political economy
and the laws of trade, and quote from memory all the statistics of
the census library, and yet be immeasurably surpassed in practical
business, by a young man whose college was the store, and whose
university was the counting room.
It should not be inferred from this that learning is not of the
greatest value, or that the facts obtained from the proper books are
to be ignored. The best investment a young man can make is in good
books, the study of which broadens the mind, and the facts of which
equip him the better for his life calling.
But books are not valuable only because of the available information
they give; when they do not instruct, they elevate and refine.
"Books," said Hazlitt, "wind into the heart; the poet's verse slides
into the current of our blood. We read them when young, we remember
them when old. We read there of what has happened to others; we feel
that it has happened to ourselves. They are to be had everywhere
cheap and good. We breathe but the air of books. We owe everything
to their authors, on this side barbarism."
A good book is often the best urn of a life, enshrining the best
thoughts of which that life was capable; for the world of a man's
life is, for the most part, but the world of his thoughts. Thus the
best books are treasuries of good words and golden thoughts, which,
remembered and cherished, become our abiding companions and
comforters. "They are never alone," said Sir Philip Sidney, "that
are accompanied by noble thoughts." The good and true thought may in
time of temptation be as an angel of mercy, purifying and guarding
the soul. It also enshrines the germs of action, for good words
almost invariably inspire to good works.
Thus Sir Henry Lawrence prized above all other compositions
Wordsworth's "Character of the Happy Warrior," which he endeavored
to embody in his own life. It was ever before him as an exemplar. He
thought of it continually, and often quoted it to others. His
biographer says, "He tried to conform his own life and to assimilate
his own character to it; and he succeeded, as all men succeed who
are truly in earnest."
Books possess an essence of immortality. They are by far the most
lasting products of human effort. Temples crumble into ruin;
pictures and statues decay; but books survive. Time is of no account
with great thoughts, which are as fresh to-day as when they first
passed through their authors' minds, ages ago. What was then said
and thought still speaks to us as vividly as ever from the printed
page. The only effect of time has been to sift and winnow out the
bad products; for nothing in literature can long survive but what is
really good.
To the young man, "thirsting for learning and hungering for
education," there are no books more helpful than the biographies of
those whom it is well to imitate. Longfellow wisely says:
"Lives of great men all remind us,
We can make our lives sublime,
And departing leave behind us,
Footprints on the sands of time--
Footprints which perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and ship-wrecked brother,
Seeing, may take heart again."
At the head of all biographies stands the Great Biography--the Book
of Books. And what is the Bible, the most sacred and impressive of
all books--the educator of youth, the guide of manhood, and the
consoler of age--but a series of biographies of great heroes and
patriarchs, prophets, kings and judges, culminating in the greatest
biography of all--the Life embodied in the New Testament? How much
have the great examples there set forth done for mankind! How many
have drawn from them their best strength, their highest wisdom,
their best nurture and admonition! Truly does a great and deeply
pious writer describe the Bible as a book whose words "live in the
ear like a music that never can be forgotten--like the sound of
church-bells which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its
felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It
is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national
seriousness. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent
traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of
all the griefs and trials of man is hidden beneath its words. It is
the representative of his best moments; and all that has been about
him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and good, speaks to
him forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which
doubt has never dimmed and controversy never soiled. In the length
and breadth of the land there is not an individual with one spark of
religiousness about him whose spiritual biography is not in his
Saxon Bible."
History itself is best studied in biography. Indeed, history is
biography--collective humanity as influenced and governed by
individual men. "What is all history," says Emerson, "but the work
of ideas, a record of the incomparable energy which his infinite
aspirations infuse into man? In its pages it is always persons we
see more than principles. Historical events are interesting to us
mainly in connection with the feelings, the sufferings, and
interests of those by whom they are accomplished. In history we are
surrounded by men long dead, but whose speech and whose deeds
survive. We almost catch the sound of their voices; and what they
did constitutes the interest of history. We never feel personally
interested in masses of men; but we feel and sympathize with the
individual actors, whose biographies afford the finest and most real
touches in all great historical dramas."
As in portraiture, so in biography--there must be light and shade.
The portrait-painter does not pose his sitter so as to bring out his
deformities; nor does the biographer give undue prominence to the
defects of the character he portrays. Not many men are so outspoken
as Cromwell was when he sat to Cooper for his miniature: "Paint me
as I am," said he, "wart and all." Yet, if we would have a faithful
likeness of faces and characters, they must be painted as they are.
"Biography," said Sir Walter Scott, "the most interesting of every
species of composition, loses all its interest with me when the
shades and lights of the principal characters are not accurately and
faithfully detailed. I can no more sympathize with a mere eulogist
than I can with a ranting hero on the stage."
It is to be regretted that in this day the country is flooded with
cheap, trashy fiction, the general tendency of which is not only not
educational, but is positively destructive. The desire to read this
stuff is as demoralizing as the opium habit.
There are works of fiction, cheap and available, too, whose influence
is elevating, and some knowledge of which is essential to the young
man who is using his spare hours for the purpose of self-education.
There is no room for doubt that the surpassing interest which
fiction, whether in poetry or prose, possesses for most minds arises
mainly from the biographic element which it contains. Homer's "Iliad
"owes its marvelous popularity to the genius which its author
displayed in the portrayal of heroic character. Yet he does not so
much describe his personages in detail as make them develop
themselves by their actions. "There are in Homer," said Dr. Johnson,
"such characters of heroes and combination of qualities of heroes,
that the united powers of mankind ever since have not produced any
but what are to be found there."
The genius of Shakespeare, also, was displayed in the powerful
delineation of character, and the dramatic evolution of human
passions. His personages seem to be real--living and breathing
before us. So, too, with Cervantes, whose Sancho Panza, though
homely and vulgar, is intensely human. The characters in Le Sage's
"Gil Bias," in Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," and in Scott's
marvelous muster-roll, seem to us almost as real as persons whom we
have actually known; and De Foe's greatest works are but so many
biographies, painted in minute detail, with reality so apparently
stamped upon every page that it is difficult to believe his Robinson
Crusoe and Colonel Jack to have been fictitious persons instead of
real ones.
Then we have a fine American literature, which should be read after
the history of the country is mastered, the stories of Cooper are
fresh and invigorating, and those of Hawthorne are life studies and
prose poems. Holmes, Lowell, Emerson, Bayard Taylor, and scores of
other American writers, whose pens have added lustre to the country,
will well repay the reader.
Good books are among the best of companions; and, by elevating the
thoughts and aspirations, they act as preservatives against low
associations. "A natural turn for reading and intellectual
pursuits," says Thomas Hood, "probably preserved me from the moral
ship-wreck so apt to befall those who are deprived in early life of
their parental pilotage. My books kept me from the ring, the dogpit,
the tavern, the saloon. The closet associate of Pope and
Addison, the mind accustomed to the noble though silent discourse of
Shakespeare and Milton, will hardly seek or put up with low company
and slaves."
It has been truly said that the best books are those which most
resemble good actions. They are purifying, elevating, and
sustaining; they enlarge and liberalize the mind; they preserve it
against vulgar worldliness; they tend to produce high-minded
cheerfulness and equanimity of character; they fashion, and shape,
and humanize the mind. In the Northern universities, the schools in
which the ancient classics are studied are appropriately styled "The
Humanity Classes."
Erasmus, the great scholar, was even of opinion that books were the
necessaries of life, and clothes the luxuries; and he frequently
postponed buying the latter until he had supplied himself with the
former. His greatest favorites were the writings of Cicero, which he
says he always felt himself the better for reading. "I can never,"
he says, "read the works of Cicero on 'Old Age,' or 'Friendship,' or
his 'Tusculan Disputations,' without fervently pressing them to my
lips, without being penetrated with veneration for a mind little
short of inspired by God himself."
It is unnecessary to speak of the enormous moral influence which
books have exercised upon the general civilization of mankind, from
the Bible downward. They contain the treasured knowledge of the
human race. They are the record of all labors, achievements,
speculations, successes, and failures, in science, philosophy,
religion, and morals. They have been the greatest motive-powers in
all times. "From the Gospel to the Contrat Social," says De Bonald,
"it is books that have made revolutions." Indeed, a great book is
often a greater thing than a great battle. Even works of fiction
have occasionally exercised immense power on society.
Bear in mind that it is not all we eat that nourishes, but what we
digest. The learned man is a glutton as to books, but the educated
man knows that, no matter how much is read, benefit is only derived
from the thoughts that develop our own thoughts and strengthen our
own minds.