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Updated: May 2, 2025
Boys in the next generation will probably be asked by examiners to expose the palpable fallacies of what to us seem to be demonstrable truths. At any rate, I must try to indicate the critical point as briefly as possible. The word 'value, in the first place, has varying meanings, which give an opportunity for writers of text-books to exhibit their powers of lucid exposition.
The text-books from which the sexual system is entirely omitted ought no longer to be tolerated. The nature and secretion of the testicles, the meaning of the ovaries and of menstruation, as well as the significance of metabolism and the urinary excretion, should be clear in their main lines to all boys and girls who have reached the age of puberty.
As I interpret it, it amounts to a complete espousal of the vaguer conception of the stream of thought, and a complete renunciation of the whole business, still so industriously carried on in text-books, of chopping up 'the mind' into distinct units of composition or function, numbering these off, and labelling them by technical names.
The text-books are full of the abstractions and general formulae of the sciences; but they can, in the very nature of the case, deal only in a meager way with the individual objects and facts upon which knowledge in different subjects is based.
Under the influence of deeper study and a keener sense of justice, however, the element of bitterness, which so often entered into the discussion of this subject, has largely disappeared; and while the treatment of the Revolution in the text-books still leaves much to be desired, it is now seldom dogmatic and unsympathetic."
Mill's treatise, according to his most famous antagonist, was a mere bundle of pretentious sophistry. Macaulay came forth like a Whig David to slay the Utilitarian Goliath. The Encyclopædia articles, finished in 1824, were already in 1825, as Mill says, text-books of the young men at the Cambridge Union.
By all means, therefore, learn by heart the leading definitions and rules of your text-books, and choice passages from all famous authors. But do not attempt in this way to commit to memory, or to recite verbatim, the pages of your history, geography, rhetoric, and so forth.
One half of the male population began to practice the manual, to drill, and to study the text-books of military science; the remainder put at least equal energy into the preparations for equipment; every manufacturer in the land set the proverbial Yankee enterprise and ingenuity at work in the adaptation of his machinery to the production of munitions of war and all the various outfit for troops.
Those who make any pretence at it, usually speak it with an accent, a pronunciation and a nonchalance which show that they have taken no pains whatever to acquire it. Evidently it pays better to spend money educating natives in French than Frenchmen in Arabic. It is an amusing fact that most of the teachers have produced their own text-books, few of which possess special merit.
If the Rhetoric ad Alexandrum, at one time falsely attributed to Aristotle and incorporated in early editions of his works, is typical of the earliest Greek text-books, the failure of the others to survive is fortunate.
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