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Updated: June 27, 2025
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.
In the study of the human mind in connection with human wants, we are continually met with difficulties arising from the want of education; and quite as frequently with those resulting from education. So much so, that we hear from every wise man the declaration that as many minds are ruined by over-education as from the want of education. Man's curse is to labor.
I do not know whether it is this or the over-education that leads to the notorious child suicides of Germany, upon which so many learned treatises have been written. Just before the war it looked as though the German young man and woman were going to improve. Lawn tennis was spreading, despite old-fashioned prejudice. Football was coming in.
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.
It seems strange that there should be so little consciousness of the dangers of over-education during youth, when there is so general a consciousness of the dangers of over-education during childhood. Most parents are partially aware of the evil consequences that follow infant-precocity. In every society may be heard reprobation of those who too early stimulate the minds of their little ones.
It is because they are under-educated, not over-educated, that the children of the very poor so often go wrong. But the attempt to cast them all in the same mould is disastrous; there is an over-education going on in this direction. Not all the children of the poor can be great scholars, but some of them can! Let us give them a chance.
Art, poetry, music, science, ay, even those athletic and graceful exercises on which we all pride ourselves, which we consider necessary to soften and refine ourselves, what God has given us a monopoly of them? what is good for the rich man is good for the poor. Over-education? And what of that? What if the poor be raised above "their station"? What right have we to keep them down?
There was danger, however, in the over-education of the senses, which made their ready response inevitable, but neither limited the subjects, nor regulated the degree, to which they should respond. But it would be hard in any case to say where cultivation of love for the beautiful should end, and to determine the exact point at which the result ceases to be intellectual and begins to be sensual.
I was talking to Lady Beauwhistle's aunt the other day she's just come back from Paris, you know. Such a sweet woman" "And so silly. In these days of the over-education of women she's quite refreshing.
O my friend, I said, do not attack the multitude: they will change their minds, if, not in an aggressive spirit, but gently and with the view of soothing them and removing their dislike of over-education, you show them your philosophers as they really are and describe as you were just now doing their character and profession, and then mankind will see that he of whom you are speaking is not such as they supposed if they view him in this new light, they will surely change their notion of him, and answer in another strain.
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