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Just as the capitalists would at once capture education in craftsmanship,
seek out what little advantage there is in it, and then throw it away, so they
do with all other education. A superstition still remains from the times when
"education" was a rarity that it is a means for earning a superior
livelihood; but as soon as it has ceased to be a rarity, competition takes care
that education shall not raise wages; that general education shall be worth
nothing, and that special education shall be worth just no more than a tolerable
return on the money and time spent in acquiring it. … As to the pleasure to be
derived from education at present by hard-working men, a bookish man is apt to
think that even the almighty capitalist can hardly take away from his slave if
he has really learned to enjoy reading and to understand books, and that
whatever happens he must have an hour in a day (or if it were only half an hour)
to indulge himself in this pleasure. But then does the average hard-working man
(of any grade) really acquire this capacity by means of the short period of
education which he is painfully dragged through? I doubt it. Though even our
mechanical school system cannot crush out a natural bent towards literature
(with all the pleasures of thought and imagination which that word means) yet
certainly its dull round will hardly implant such a taste in anyone's mind. …
I must say in passing that on the few occasions that I have been inside a
Board-school, I have been much depressed by the mechanical drill that was too
obviously being applied there to all the varying capacities and moods. My heart
sank before Mr. M'Choakumchild and his method, and I thought how much luckier I
was to have been born well enough off to he sent to a school where I was taught
nothing, but learned archaeology and romance on the Wiltshire downs.
And then supposing the worker to be really educated, to have acquired both the
information and the taste for reading which Mr. M'Choakumchild's dole will allow
to him under the most favourable circumstances, how will this treasure of
knowledge and sympathy accord with his daily life? Will it not make his dull
task seem duller? Will it not increase the suffering of the workshop or the
factory to him? And if so, may he not strive to forget rather than strive to
remember … ?