He bewailed the waste of work and of life, the
poverty and the 'sweating.' He urged employers to win the goodwill
of those who worked for them as the best means of producing the best
work. He preached the 'rights' of Labour--that high wages for good
work was the truest economy in the end, and that beating down the
wages of workers does not pay in the long run. He declared that the
only education worth having was a 'humane' education--that is, first
of all, the building of character and the cultivation of wholesome
feelings. "You do not educate a man by telling him what he knew not,
but by making him what he was not," was the theory which he
endeavoured to put into practice by experiments such as an attempt
to teach every one to "learn to do something well and accurately with
his hands."
In common with Wordsworth Ruskin held that the love of Nature was
the greatest of educators. He believed that
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
The beauty and the everlasting marvel of Nature's works were, to him
as to the poet of the Lakes, the real road to knowledge:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
An education of not the brain alone, but of heart and hand as well,
all three working in co-operation, was necessary to raise man to the
level of an intelligent being.
Ruskin's teachings fared no better than those of Carlyle at first,
and though he is spoken of sometimes as being 'old-fashioned,' yet
his lesson is of the old-fashioned kind which does live and will live,
for, like Dickens, he knew how to appeal to the hearts of his readers.
Pages:
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95