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Let Youth but Know, a Plea for Reason in Education, by Kappa
Let Youth but Know a Plea for Reason in Education by Kappa Author:William Archer General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1905 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: II THE CHIEF END OF MAN A CERTAIN amount of education must be merely utilitarian; that is to say, directly subservient to the practical ends of life. This education begins when the child is taught to use a spoon. It continues when the boy learns his letters and his multiplication-table. It ends, for millions of hapless youths, in the acquisition of a trade, handicraft, or business routine, which they go on practising, mechanically and joylessly, until their mechanism is worn out and they are cast on the scrap-heap. Many more happily-situated youths never get beyond the utilitarian stage of education; for though they may "read up" Plato and master the Differential Calculus, it is all with a direct view to their worldly advancement, not to the saving of their souls alive. Their book-reading has no more spiritual value than book-keeping or book-making. But it is generally admitted that the teaching which subserves mere appetite and ambition, even with a little judicious morality thrown in, is inadequate to the real needs of the human spirit. A "liberal education " is one in which the utilitarian element is strictly preliminary and subordinate. If, in the course of these reflections, I have to condemn the ordinary classical curriculum of our public schools, it will not be because it is un-utilitarian, but because it is inefficient as a means to higher ends. What, then, is the fundamental task of a liberal education ? What should be its constant endeavour? Surely to awaken and to keep ever alert the faculty of wonder in the human soul. To take life as a matter of course -- whether painful or pleasurable ...« less