258 APPENDIX, 7

7. [p. 133.] Modern Education¹

The following fragmentary notes on this subject have been set down at different times. I have been accidentally prevented from arranging them properly for publication, but there are one or two truths in them which it is better to express insufficiently than not at all.

By a large body of the people of England and of Europe a man is called educated if he can write Latin verses and construe a Greek chorus. By some few more enlightened persons it is confessed that the construction of hexameters is not in itself an important end of human existence; but they say, that the general discipline which a course of classical reading gives to the intellectual powers is the final object of our scholastical institutions.

But it seems to me there is no small error even in this last and more philosophical theory. I believe that what it is most honourable to know, it is also most profitable to learn; and that the science which it is the highest power to possess, it is also the best exercise to acquire.

And if this be so, the question as to what should be the material of education, becomes singularly simplified. It might be a matter of dispute what processes have the greatest effect in developing the intellect; but it can hardly be disputed what facts it is most advisable that a man entering into life should accurately know.

I believe, in brief, that he ought to know three things:

First, Where he is.

Secondly, Where he is going.

Thirdly, What he had best do under those circumstances.

First, Where he is.-That is to say, what sort of a world he has got into; how large it is; what kind of creatures live in it, and how; what it is made of, and what may be made of it.

Secondly, Where he is going.-That is to say, what chances or reports there are of any other world besides this; what seems to be the nature of that other world; and whether, for information respecting, it, he had better consult the Bible, Koran, or Council of Trent.

Thirdly, What he had best do under those circumstances.-That is to say, what kind of faculties he possesses; what are the present state and wants of mankind; what is his place in society; and what are the readiest means in his power of attaining happiness and diffusing it. The man who knows these things, and who has had his will so subdued in the learning them, that he is ready to do what he knows he ought, I should call educated; and the man who knows them not,-uneducated, though he could talk all the tongues of Babel.

Our present European system of so-called education ignores, or despises, not one, nor the other, but all the three, of these great branches of human knowledge.

First, It despises Natural History.-Until within the last year or two, the instruction in the physical sciences given at Oxford² consisted of a course of

¹ [Portions, at least, of this appendix were probably written by Ruskin for a letter intended for the Times in 1852: see Vol X., Introduction, p. xli.]

² [On this subject, compare in the first volume of The Stones, Appendix 13, Vol. IX. p. 442.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]