If we are to discuss the importance of art, learning, and intellectual
culture, the first thing we have to recognize is that we have very
little of them at present; and that this little has not been produced by
compulsory education: nay, that the scarcity is unnatural and has been
produced by the violent exclusion of art and artists from schools. On
the other hand we have quite a considerable degree of bodily culture:
indeed there is a continual outcry against the sacrifice of mental
accomplishments to athletics. In other words a sacrifice of the
professed object of compulsory education to the real object of voluntary
education. It is assumed that this means that people prefer bodily
to mental culture; but may it not mean that they prefer liberty and
satisfaction to coercion and privation. Why is it that people who have
been taught Shakespear as a school subject loathe his plays and cannot
by any means be persuaded ever to open his works after they escape from
school, whereas there is still, 300 years after his death, a wide and
steady sale for his works to people who read his plays as plays, and not
as task work? If Shakespear, or for that matter, Newton and Leibnitz,
are allowed to find their readers and students they will find them.
If their works are annotated and paraphrased by dullards, and the
annotations and paraphrases forced on all young people by imprisonment
and flogging and scolding, there will not be a single man of letters or
higher mathematician the more in the country: on the contrary there will
be less, as so many potential lovers of literature and mathematics will
have been incurably prejudiced against them. Everyone who is conversant
with the class in which child imprisonment and compulsory schooling is
carried out to the final extremity of the university degree knows that
its scholastic culture is a sham; that it knows little about literature
or art and a great deal about point-to-point races; and that the
village cobbler, who has never read a page of Plato, and is admittedly
a dangerously ignorant man politically, is nevertheless a Socrates
compared to the classically educated gentlemen who discuss politics in
country houses at election time (and at no other time) after their day's
earnest and skilful shooting. Think of the years and years of weary
torment the women of the piano-possessing class have been forced to
spend over the keyboard, fingering scales. How many of them could be
bribed to attend a pianoforte recital by a great player, though they
will rise from sick beds rather than miss Ascot or Goodwood?
Another familiar fact that teaches the same lesson is that many women
who have voluntarily attained a high degree of culture cannot add
up their own housekeeping books, though their education in simple
arithmetic was compulsory, whereas their higher education has been
wholly voluntary. Everywhere we find the same result. The imprisonment,
the beating, the taming and laming, the breaking of young spirits, the
arrest of development, the atrophy of all inhibitive power except the
power of fear, are real: the education is sham. Those who have been
taught most know least.