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nations who rule the world by their force of will, their
initiative, and their spirit of enterprise. In a series of
remarkable pages, whose principal passages I reproduce further
on, a great thinker, M. Taine, has clearly shown that our former
system of education was approximately that in vogue to-day in
England and America, and in a remarkable parallel between the
Latin and Anglo-Saxon systems he has plainly pointed out the
consequences of the two methods.
One might consent, perhaps, at a pinch, to continue to accept all
the disadvantages of our classical education, although it
produced nothing but discontented men, and men unfitted for their
station in life, did the superficial acquisition of so much
knowledge, the faultless repeating by heart of so many
textbooks, raise the level of intelligence. But does it really
raise this level? Alas, no! The conditions of success in life
are the possession of judgment, experience, initiative, and
character—qualities which are not bestowed by books. Books are
dictionaries, which it is useful to consult, but of which it is
perfectly useless to have lengthy portions in one’s head.
How is it possible for professional instruction to develop the
intelligence in a measure quite beyond the reach of classical
instruction? This has been well shown by M. Taine.
“Ideas, he says, are only formed in their natural and normal
surroundings; the promotion of the growth is effected by the
innumerable impressions appealing to the senses which a young man
receives daily in the workshop, the mine, the law court, the
study, the builder’s yard, the hospital; at the sight of tools,
materials, and operations; in the presence of customers, workers,
and labour, of work well or ill done, costly or lucrative. In
such a way are obtained those trifling perceptions of detail of
the eyes, the ear, the hands, and even the sense of smell, which,
picked up involuntarily, and silently elaborated, take shape
within the learner, and suggest to him sooner or, later this or
that new combination, simplification, economy, improvement, or
invention. The young Frenchman is deprived, and precisely at the
age when they are most fruitful, of all these precious contacts,
of all these indispensable elements of assimilation. For seven
or eight years on end he is shut up in a school, and is cut off
from that direct personal experience which would give him a keen
and exact notion of men and things and of the various ways of
handling them.”
” … At least nine out of ten have wasted their time and pains
during several years of their life—telling, important, even
decisive years. Among such are to be counted, first of all, the
half or two-thirds of those who present themselves for
examination—I refer to those who are rejected; and then among
those who are successful, who obtain a degree, a certificate, a
diploma, there is still a half or two-thirds—I refer to the
overworked. Too much has been demanded of them by exacting that
on a given day, on a chair or before a board, they should, for
two hours in succession, and with respect to a group of sciences,
be living repertories of all human knowledge. In point of fact
they were that, or nearly so, for two hours on that particular
day, but a month later they are so no longer. They could not go
through the examination again. Their too numerous and too
burdensome acquisitions slip incessantly from their mind, and are
not replaced. Their mental vigour has declined, their fertile
capacity for growth has dried up, the fully-developed man
appears, and he is often a used-up man. Settled down, married,
resigned to turning in a circle, and indefinitely in the same
circle, he shuts himself up in his confined function, which he
fulfils adequately, but nothing more. Such is the average yield:
assuredly the receipts do not balance the expenditure. In
England or America, where, as in France previous to 1789, the
contrary proceeding is adopted, the outcome obtained is equal or
superior.”
The illustrious psychologist subsequently shows us the difference
between our system and that of the Anglo-Saxons. The latter do
not possess our innumerable special schools. With them
instruction is not based on book-learning, but on object lessons.
The engineer, for example, is trained in a workshop, and never at
a school; a method which allows of each individual reaching the
level his intelligence permits of. He becomes a workman or a
foreman if he can get no further, an engineer if his aptitudes
take him as far. This manner of proceeding is much more
democratic and of much greater benefit to society than that of
making the whole career of an individual depend on an
examination, lasting a few hours, and undergone at the age of
nineteen or twenty.
“In the hospital, the mine, the factory, in the architect’s or
the lawyer’s office, the student, who makes a start while very
young, goes through his apprenticeship, stage by stage, much as
does with us a law clerk in his office, or an artist in his
studio. Previously, and before making a practical beginning, he
has had an opportunity of following some general and summary
course of instruction, so as to have a framework ready prepared
in which to store the observations he is shortly to make.
Furthermore he is able, as a rule, to avail himself of sundry
technical courses which he can follow in his leisure hours, so as
to co-ordinate step by step the daily experience he is gathering.
Under such a system the practical capabilities increase and
develop of themselves in exact proportion to the faculties of the
student, and in the direction requisite for his future task and
the special work for which from now onwards he desires to fit
himself. By this means in England or the United States a young
man is quickly in a position to develop his capacity to the
utmost. At twenty-five years of age, and much sooner if the
material and the parts are there, he is not merely a useful
performer, he is capable also of spontaneous enterprise; he is
not only a part of a machine, but also a motor. In France, where
the contrary system prevails—in France, which with each
succeeding generation is falling more and more into line with
China—the sum total of the wasted forces is enormous.”
The great philosopher arrives at the following conclusion with
respect to the growing incongruity between our Latin system of
education and the requirements of practical life:—
“In the three stages of instruction, those of childhood,
adolescence and youth, the theoretical and pedagogic preparation
by books on the school benches has lengthened out and become
overcharged in view of the examination, the degree, the diploma,
and the certificate, and solely in this view, and by the worst
methods, by the application of an unnatural and anti-social
regime, by the excessive postponement of the practical
apprenticeship, by our boarding-school system, by artificial
training and mechanical cramming, by overwork, without thought
for the time that is to follow, for the adult age and the
functions of the man, without regard for the real world on which
the young man will shortly be thrown, for the society in which we
move and to which he must be adapted or be taught to resign
himself in advance, for the struggle in which humanity is
engaged, and in which to defend himself and to keep his footing
he ought previously to have been equipped, armed, trained, and
hardened. This indispensable equipment, this acquisition of more
importance than any other, this sturdy common sense and nerve and
will-power our schools do not procure the young Frenchman; on the
contrary, far from qualifying him for his approaching and
definite state, they disqualify him. In consequence, his entry
into the world and his first steps in the field of action are
most often merely a succession of painful falls, whose effect is
that he long remains wounded and bruised, and sometimes disabled
for life. The test is severe and dangerous. In the course of it
the mental and moral equilibrium is affected, and runs the risk
of not being re-established. Too sudden and complete disillusion
has supervened. The deceptions have been too great, the
disappointments too keen.”[12]
[12] Taine, “Le Regime moderne,” vol. ii., 1894. These pages are
almost the last that Taine wrote. They resume admirably the
results of the great philosopher’s long experience.
Unfortunately they are in my opinion totally incomprehensible for
such of our university professors who have not lived abroad.
Education is the only means at our disposal of influencing to
some extent the mind of a nation, and it is profoundly saddening
to have to think that there is scarcely any one in France who can
arrive at understanding that our present system of teaching is a
grave cause of rapid decadence, which instead of elevating our
youth, lowers and perverts it.
A useful comparison may be made between Taine’s pages and the
observations on American education recently made by M. Paul
Bourget in his excellent book, “Outre-Mer.” He, too, after
having noted that our education merely produces narrow-minded
bourgeois, lacking in initiative and will-power, or
anarchists—“those two equally harmful types of the civilised
man, who degenerates into impotent platitude or insane
destructiveness”—he too, I say, draws a comparison that cannot
be the object of too much reflection between our French lycees
(public schools), those factories of degeneration, and the
American schools, which prepare a man admirably for life. The
gulf existing between truly democratic nations and those who have
democracy in their speeches, but in no wise in their thoughts, is
clearly brought out in this comparison.
Have we digressed in what precedes from the psychology of crowds?
Assuredly not. If we desire to understand the ideas and beliefs
that are germinating to-day in the masses, and will spring up
to-morrow, it is necessary to know how the ground has been
prepared. The instruction given the youth of a country allows of
a knowledge of what that country will one day be. The education
accorded the present generation justifies the most gloomy
previsions. It is in part by instruction and education that the
mind of the masses is improved or deteriorated. It was necessary
in consequence to show how this mind has been fashioned by the
system in vogue, and how the mass of the indifferent and the
neutral has become progressively an army of the discontented
ready to obey all the suggestions of utopians and rhetoricians.
It is in the schoolroom that socialists and anarchists are found
nowadays, and that the way is being paved for the approaching
period of decadence for the Latin peoples.
THE IMMEDIATE FACTORS OF THE OPINIONS OF CROWDS
1. IMAGES, WORDS AND FORMULAE. The magical power of words
and formulae—The power of words bound up with the images they
evoke, and independent of their real sense—These images vary
from age to age, and from race to race—The wear and tear of
words—Examples of the considerable variations of sense of
much-used words—The political utility of baptizing old things
with new names when the words by which they were designated
produced an unfavourable impression on the masses— variations of
the sense of words in consequence of race differences—The
different meanings of the word “democracy” in Europe and America.
2. ILLUSIONS. Their importance—They are to be found at the
root of all civilisations—The social necessity of
illusions—Crowds always prefer them to truths. 3.
EXPERIENCE. Experience alone can fix in the mind of crowds truths
become necessary and destroy illusions grown
dangerous—Experience is only effective on the condition that it
be frequently repeated—The cost of the experiences requisite to
persuade crowds. 4. REASON. The nullity of its influence on
crowds—Crowds only to be influenced by their unconscious
sentiments— The role of logic in history—The secret causes
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