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Updated: September 2, 2025
The unanimous reports of the educationists from all parts of the world who attended the last pedagogic and psychological international congresses lamented the "lack of character" in the young as constituting a great danger to the race. But it is not that character is lacking in the race; it is that school distorts the body and weakens the spirit.
But these, in so far as, he can secure their benefits, are just the elements that make the thinker, the scholar, the man of real learning or intellectual power in any pursuit. New-York Teacher, December, 1859. A like view begins to show itself in the writings of some of the English educationists.
The average series of used stamps are now so cheap that a lad may get together a fairly representative collection for what he ordinarily spends at the tuck shop. Some educationists have advocated the making and exhibiting of school collections of stamps as aids to study.
Were we a homogeneous population one diet for all might be justifiable, but as things are, we should offer the greatest possible variety. From Rousseau onwards educationists, deriving their views, I suppose, from some metaphysical or theological conception of human equality, speak continually of the "mind of the child" as if the young of our species conformed to a single type.
Yet whole schools of thought on these subjects are cheerfully ignored by the majority of our educationists; hence the unintelligent and indeed babyish view of religion which is harboured by many adults, even of the intellectual class.
Count Tostoi practically issued one of his papal encyclicals against music; and I have heard of modern educationists who forbid children to play with tin soldiers. It seems they breed an appetite for blood. But never mind that; one must keep one's temper in this madhouse. I need only insist here that these things, even if a just deprivation, are a deprivation.
All that comes of your hard-hearted, hard-headed, music-painting-and-poetry-despising, utilitarian, intellectual, all-in-all educationists, who know nothing so admirable as a steam-engine, and would wish to see the whole world worked by machinery. Here is a specimen of the slip-slop with which so many thousand reams of paper have lately been spoiled.
It would not fling away gold leaf any more than gold coin; it would not heedlessly pour out purple or crimson, any more than it would spill good wine or shed blameless blood. That is the hard task before educationists in this special matter; they have to teach people to relish colors like liquors. They have the heavy business of turning drunkards into wine tasters.
But the fact that this should be the case at all speaks eloquently for the crass ignorance which results from the confounding, on the part of so-called educationists, of mere fact-cramming and subject-compulsion with the proper development of the human faculties.
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