United States or Canada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But these results of over-education, disastrous as they are, are perhaps less disastrous than the effects produced on the health the undermined constitution, the enfeebled energies, the morbid feelings. Recent discoveries in physiology have shown how immense is the influence of the brain over the functions of the body.
It is not they who suffer in the worst sense from the evil effects of over-education, but the gifted children, as they are called, or those whose quick, nervous intellects are most susceptible to the process of receiving any kind of instruction. It is the nervous boy or girl who generally makes the most promising pupil.
Thacker, Spink & Co., of Calcutta, which interested me, for both its preface and its contents treated of this matter of over-education. In the preface occurs this paragraph from the Calcutta Review.
Among some large landowners we find tolerably conservative notions even in France. Over-education, they say, is unfitting the people for manual labour, putting them out of their place, and so forth. Moles are not exterminated. "They do more good than harm," said my host, "and I like them." I had heard the same thing at Caumont, where were many mole-hills.
And it might almost be said that the failures are to be ascribed, in part, if not to over-education, at least to the common misdirection of acquirements, accompanied with the vague ambition and desires which they invariably excite, but rarely serve to satisfy. Why, I could find, for instance, in the history, management, and success of every newspaper editor, a living proof of my proposition.
It is very sad and wrong, but it is not altogether his fault; it is rather a fault of the age, of over-education, of over-striving to be wise. Cultivate the searching spirit and it will grow and rend you. The spirit would soar, it would see, but the flesh weighs it down, and in all flesh there is little light.
For although Rene was unquestionably brave and more than passably handsome, he had no armor, no war-horse, no shining lance and embossed shield the difference, indeed, was great. Those who love to contend against the fatal drift of our age toward over-education could find in Alice Tarleton, foster daughter of Gaspard Roussillon, a primitive example, an elementary case in point.
There are still people here and there who talk about the danger of educating the poor "above their station," but those who know the poor in our large cities from actual contact feel that over-education is the very least of the dangers that beset them.
Is there not, with such a group and in such a crisis, infinitely more danger to be apprehended from half-trained minds and shallow thinking than from over-education and over-refinement? Surely we have wit enough to found a Negro college so manned and equipped as to steer successfully between the dilettante and the fool.
"I'm surprised you didn't, Drusilla." "What's that? Well, I guess I would if I'd a thought of it in time, but I was interested in the talk about the 'new woman' I guess that's what they called her. I said I didn't believe too much in the over-education of females. That I'd rather be looked down to in lovin' tenderness than up to in silent awe, and that men can't love and wonder at the same time.
Word Of The Day