Of the Education of Children

The appetite and affection for learning ought to be kindled in children, otherwise we do but load them. They are given books as one gives a load to an ass; they carry it, but are not thereby better scholars. The purpose of education, if it has a purpose, is not to furnish the child’s memory with the works and sentences of others, but to create in him an active, judicious, and vigorous mind. We should not trouble ourselves so much about filling him full as about forming and instructing him.

A tutor, therefore, ought not so much to imprint anything on his pupil’s memory as to form his judgment. Let him not ask him merely to repeat what has been said, but let him examine what he thinks of it. Let him make him try the new thing in practice, apply it to some case, adapt it to some real difficulty. It is a sign of rawness and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same condition it was swallowed. The stomach that does its work changes the quality of what it receives; the mind that does its work changes the quality of what it learns.

“Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust.”

This is the difference between the educated man and the pedant: the one has made his learning his own, has coloured it with his character, has worn it into the shape of his life; the other carries it folded and unused, a garment too fine to put on. The first can answer a new question; the second can only quote an old answer.

Experience must therefore be given its proper place alongside reading. The young man should travel, should encounter different customs, should be made to feel in his own person the variety of the world. He should observe the manners of various peoples, the forms of various governments, the judgments and customs of different nations. He should deal with men, not only with books; and when he deals with men, he should be encouraged to argue, to question, to reach his own conclusions — and to change them when better evidence appears. A child well-formed is worth more to the world than a child well-informed.