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Patriotism and popular education ... (1920)
Patriotism and popular education - 1920 Author:Henry Arthur Jones Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PATRIOTISM AND POPULAR EDUCATION CHAPTER I (llarch—April 1918) My old Carpenter—"Artistic, sixpence three farthings"—A well ducated working man—Dame Nat... more »ure a harsher "exploiter" than the capitalist—Working men cheat their brother working men— Not a question of Capital and Labour, but of honesty or dishonesty—A call for the Parsons—Proposal to ship some of them to Kikuyu—Robinion Crusoe and Friday's neglected education— Deplorable ignorance of Friday of matters that did not concern him—Consequent economic stability of the island—Friday's capacity for abstract thought—General education the enemy of good craftsmanship—Monstrous and ridiculous proposal to drill our boys for the future defence of their country—Equally monstrous and ridiculous proposal to teach our girls what will be useful to them as wives and mothers—Enlargement of dictum of the Minister of Education concerning general education. POPULAR Education has now been in force for nearly fifty years. I have in my mind a fairly typical working man of the better class of fifty years ago. He was a carpenter in a small provincial town. He had received a very limited education, I suppose at a National School of those days, which I daresay he left at about the age of twelve. He was probably then apprenticed to his trade. He must have learned it thoroughly in all its branches; for when I knew him in his late middle age, he could and did make with his own hands, the whole of a large useful cabinet for a middle-class sitting room. That cabinet, by its sound workmanship, its sensible shape, its fitness and utility, would utterly shame and condemn anything that a middle-class family could buy at furnishing shops in 1914, at three or four times its price. You cannot get as good workmanship to-day in its class. He was equal...« less