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Show THE WESTERN MAN. "We have invented what we call a system of education approaching perfection as an organization, comprehensive, diffused, all-inclusive, necessarily more or less superficial. Its aim is to teach everybody everything. Perhaps a more exact statement of the truth is, that the aim is to train everybody to pass an examination in everything. It may be said that the exclusive examination system encourages two virtues-to forgive and to forget-in time to forgive the examiner, and to forget the subject of the examination. The tests of the value of our system of education, already tending to become too machine-like, will be two-fold, and the results may not be marked before the lapse of a generation or two. First, what kind of an education, as to the more important elements of character, are we to get; and, second, what is to be the effect of a universal education, or a universal smattering of learning, upon the inclination to work, to work with the hands, to earn a living by manual labor? The noblest aspiration of youth is the cultivation of the mind-if the body is not neglected. But if the Western man should get the notion that it is any less honorable, or in the end less satisfactory, to work with a hoe than with a pen or a yard stick, he will foster an idea that is neither new nor needed in the world, for the Eastern man has already run it into the ground."-Scribner. |