We want to make boys on the one hand detest tyranny and
high-handedness and bigotry and ruthless exercise of power, and on the
other hand mistrust stupidity and ignorance and baseness and
selfishness and suspiciousness. The study of high literature is
valuable not as a mere exercise in erudition and linguistic nicety and
critical taste, but because the great books mirror best the highest
hopes and visions of human nature. The precise extent of the
intellectual range matters very little, compared with the
perceptiveness and emotion by which the realisation of other lives,
other needs, other activities, other problems are accompanied.
I must not be supposed, in saying this, to be leaving out of sight the
virile exercise of logical and rational faculties; but that is another
side of education; and the grave deficiency which I detect in the old
theory was that practically all the powers and devices of education
were devoted to what was called fortifying the mind and making it into
a perfect instrument, while there were left out of sight the motives
which were to guide the use of that instrument, and the boy was led to
suppose that he was to fortify his mind solely for his own advantage.
This individualist theory must somehow be modified. The aim of the
process I have described is not simply to indicate to the boy the
amount of selfish pleasure which he can obtain from literary
masterpieces; it is rather to show the boy that he is not alone and
isolated, in a world where it is advisable for him to take and keep
all that he can; but that he is one of a great fellowship of emotions
and interests, and that his happiness depends upon his becoming aware
of this, while his usefulness and nobleness must depend upon his
disinterestedness, and upon the extent to which he is willing to share
his advantages.
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