A Treatise on Parents and Children

Technical instruction tempts to violence (as a short cut) more / than liberal education. The sailor in Mr Rudyard Kipling's Captains / Courageous, teaching the boy the names of the ship's tackle with a / rope's end, does not disgust us as our schoolmasters do, especially as / the boy was a spoiled boy. But an unspoiled boy would not have needed / that drastic medicine. Technical training may be as tedious as learning / to skate or to play the piano or violin; but it is the price one must / pay to achieve certain desirable results or necessary ends. It is a / monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics / on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental / powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true; for there is no / labor that might not be imposed on a child or an adult on the same / pretext; but as a glance at the average products of our public school / and university education shews that it is not true, it need not trouble / us. But it is a fact that ignorance of Latin and Greek and mathematics / closes certain careers to men (I do not mean artificial, unnecessary, / noxious careers like those of the commercial schoolmaster). Languages, / even dead ones, have their uses; and, as it seems to many of us, / mathematics have their uses. They will always be learned by people who / want to learn them; and people will always want to learn them as long as / they are of any importance in life: indeed the want will survive their / importance: superstition is nowhere stronger than in the field of / obsolete acquirements. And they will never be learnt fruitfully by / people who do not want to learn them either for their own sake or for / use in necessary work. There is no harder schoolmaster than experience; / and yet experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn.

Still, one must not begin to apply this generalization too early. / And this brings me to an important factor in the case: the factor of / evolution.