ARGUMENTS
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completest sympathy. Purple Hearts are in order, no doubt. But having
uttered this
mea culpa,
I should like to go the whole hog and in
conclusion propose my own educational utopia, wild as it is. As has so
often been said, talk is cheap (and harmless).
My strongest negative feeling about grade-school education in
America is that, once outside English or languages or math, it fills
the students' heads, from first to last, with a lot of irrelevant, useless
and inert information, and that it has no real shape or form. This is
true even at the good schools. Anyone who has surveyed those dreary
"science" text books used in the grade schools, with their explanations
of the workings of modern plumbing, or those "social science" texts with
their liberal pieties and their "cutenesses" and their masses of irrelevant
information, or, even at their best, those reading lists for the study
of literature, with their Pearl Bucks and John Steinbecks, can only
agree. Similarly, colleges and universities often deal in high-level junk.
Thus the esthetic component of knowledge, so important, disappears,
down the drain, literally, while the students are asked to absorb a shape–
less mass of irrelevancies.
I t is visionary and perhaps useless to hope-since so far modern
civilization never does get back to what really counts-that there will
some day
be
a genuine educational system, something we have never
really had, that at its highest level takes the best students and gives
them a genuinely elite education, somewhat like that James Mill pro–
vided for John Stuart Mill: from three years to eight years nothing
but Greek and arithmetic with Latin beginning at eight. After that his–
tory, other languages, science and so on. About this education Mill made
two significant remarks: first he maintained, perhaps with excessive
modesty, that he was not an especially brilliant or precocious child (in
other words many other children could have done it) and that it put
him twenty years ahead of his contemporaries. As to the point that the
education later helped to give him a nervous breakdown, the answer is
that plenty of people have the breakdown without the education.
About Greece itself Mill was to say many years later in his review
of Grote:
The interest of Grecian history is unexhausted and inexhaustible.
As a mere story, hardly any other portion of authentic history can
compete with it.
It
is also, of all histories of which we know so much, the most
abounding in consequences to us who live now.
Even in English history, according to Mill, the battle of Marathon was
more important than the battle of Hastings, for without Marathon the
