Meantime my own hours are increasingly filled.  It takes me a long time to prepare for the children’s lessons; and I have my reward abundantly in the delight of seeing their intelligence, their perception, their interest grow.  I am determined that the beginnings of knowledge shall be for them a primrose path; I suppose there will have to be some stricter mental discipline later; but they shall begin by thinking and expecting things to be interesting and delightful, before they realise that things can also be hard and dull.

June 20, 1889.

When I read books on education, when I listen to the talk of educational theorists, when I see syllabuses and schedules, schemes and curricula, a great depression settles on my mind; I feel I have no interest in education, and a deep distrust of theoretical methods.  These things seem to aim at missing the very thing of which we are in search, and to lose themselves in a sort of childish game, a marshalling of processions, a lust for organisation.  I care so intensely for what it all means, I loathe so deeply the motives that seem at work.  I suppose that the ordinary man considers a species of success, a bettering of himself, the acquisition of money and position and respectability, to be the end of life; and such as these look upon education primarily as a means of arriving at their object.  Such was the old education given by the sophists, which aimed at turning out a well-balanced, effective man.  But all this, it seems to me, has the wrong end in view.  The success of it depends upon the fact that every one is not so capable of rising, that the rank and file must be in the background, forming the material out of which the successful man makes his combinations, and whom he contrives to despoil.

The result of it is that the well-educated man becomes hard, brisk, complacent, contemptuous, knowing his own worth, using his equipment for precise and definite ends.

My idea would rather be that education should aim at teaching people how to be happy without success; because the shadow of success is vulgarity, and vulgarity is the one thing which education ought to extinguish.  What I desire is that men should learn to see what is beautiful, to find pleasure in homely work, to fill leisure with innocent enjoyment.  If education, as the term is generally used, were widely and universally successful, the whole fabric of a nation would collapse, because no one thus educated would acquiesce in the performance of humble work.  It is commonly said that education ought to make men dissatisfied, and teach them to desire to improve their position.  It is a pestilent heresy.  It ought to teach them to be satisfied with simple conditions, and to improve themselves rather than their position—­the end of it ought to be to produce content.  Suppose, for an instant—­it sounds a fantastic hypothesis—­that a man born in the country, in the labouring class, were fond of field-work, a lover of the sights of nature in all her aspects, fond of good literature, why should he seek to change his conditions?  But education tends to make boys and girls fond of excitement, fond of town sociabilities and amusements, till only the dull and unambitious are content to remain in the country.  And yet the country work will have to be done until the end of time.