WHAT ARE OUR CHILDREN LEARNING ?

Bruce Herald, Volume XVII, Issue 1753, 28 May 1886, Page 6

WHAT ARE OUR CHILDREN LEARNING ?

A LETTER BY MR RT7SKIN. The Spectator, in a late issue published an interesting article entitled "Education and Discontent." Seting out from tie fact that so many of our modern Anarchists are men of high culture, the writer (says the Pall Mall Gazette) went on to puzzle his head over what seemed to him to be the general fact, that education has not after all, or at anyrate has not yet, succeeded in extirpating crime. Like most men who play with an apparent paradox, the writer soon began to exaggerate, and suggested that education not only did not extirpate but actually aggravated crime. It increases greed and it excites discontent. It makes men neither good nor intelligent, it does not add either security to property or patience to suftering. What is the reason of this ? Why, the writer asked, has education fallen so miserably short of what was expected of it ? The writer in the Spectator waa sadly bewildered, and could not suppose that it was the fault of human nature. The idea that it may be the fault of education does not seem to have occurred to him. All education as far as his argument went, was exactly the same in its properties, the education of Plato as the education of the School Board. The other side of the case is put verj- clearly and characteristically in the following letter by Mr Ruskin : — Brant wood, March 16. Sir, — Wili you permit me to ask the editor of the Spectator, with reference to the article on education in his last Saturday's isaue, whether he has ever chanced to notice anything that either Mr Thomas Carlyle or I, his pupil, have written on the subject during the last 30 years ? and, farther, what he, the said editor — understands by the term " education ? " I know of nothing that has been taught the youth of our time, except that their fathers were apes, and their mothers winkles ; that the world began in accident, and will end in darkness ; that honour is a folly, ambition a virtue, charity a vice, poverty a crime, and rascality the means of all wealth, and the sum of all wisdom. Both Mr Carlyle and I knew perfectly well all along what would be the outcome of that education. And I should be extremely glad to know what else was expected from it by lhe members of the School Board ? — I am, Sir, your obedient servant, John Ruskin.