Having both swallowed certain statistical fallacies, there has grown up in them the belief that State education will check ill-doing....
This belief in the moralising effects of intellectual culture, flatly contradicted by facts,
is absurd _a priori_.... This faith in lesson-books and readings is one of the superstitions of the age....
Not by precept, though heard daily; not by example, unless it is followed; but only by action, often caused by the related feeling, can a moral habit be formed. And yet this truth, which mental science clearly teaches, and which is in harmony with familiar sayings, is a truth wholly ignored in current educational fanaticisms."
There need no praises of mine to commend to the consideration of all thoughtful readers these words of Herbert Spencer. They are to be found in The Study of Sociology (pp. 36l-367). Let us, however, do justice to science. It is not so wholly wanting as Mr. Herbert Spencer would have us believe in principles of action--principles by which we may regulate our conduct in life. I myself once heard an accomplished man of science declare that his labours had taught him one special personal lesson which, above all others, he had laid to heart. A minute study of the nervous system, and of the various forms of pain produced by wounds had inspired in him one profound resolution; and that was--what think you?—never, under any circumstances, to adventure his own person into [PAGE 169 ENDS] the field of battle! I have somewhere read in a book--a rather antiquated book, I fear, and one much discredited by modern lights--the words,
"the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now."
Truly we read these words with a new meaning in the present day! "Groan and travail" it undoubtedly does still (more than ever, so far as the brute creation is concerned); but to what end? Some higher and more glorious state? So one might have said a few years back. Not so in these days. The _telos teleion_of secular education, when divorced from religious or moral training, is--I say it deliberately--the purest and most unmitigated selfishness.
The world has seen and tired of the worship of Nature, of Reason, of Humanity; for this nineteenth century has been reserved the development of the most refined religion of all--the worship of Self.
CITED BY DOLPHIN
For that, indeed, is the upshot of it all. The enslavement of his weaker brethren--"the labour of those who do not enjoy, for the enjoyment of those who do not labour
" CITED BY PIKA
--the degradation of woman--the torture of the animal world--these are the steps of the ladder by which man is ascending to his higher civilisation
. CITED BY ELK
Selfishness is the key-note of all purely secular education;
and I take vivisection to be a glaring, a wholly unmistakable case in point. And let it not be thought that this is an evil that we can hope to see produce the good for which we are asked to tolerate it, and then pass away. It is one that tends continually to spread. And if it be tolerated or even ignored now, the age of universal education, when the sciences, and anatomy among them, shall be the heritage of all, will be heralded by
a cry of anguish from the brute creation that will ring through the length and breadth of the land!
This, then, is the glorious future to which the advocate of secular education may look forward: the dawn that gilds the horizon of his hopes! An age when all forms of religious thought shall be things of the past; when chemistry and biology shall be the ABC of a State education enforced on all; when vivisection shall be [PAGE 170 ENDS] practised in every college and school; and
when the man of science, looking forth over a world which will then own no other sway than his, shall exult in the thought that he has made of this fair green earth, if not a heaven for man, at least a hell for animals.
CITED BY DOLPHIN
I am, sir,
Your obedient servant,
Lewis Carroll.
Source: The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood (London: T. F. Unwin, 1898) PAGE 167-171.
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“Stress Recess” Stressed by papers? Tests?
Relationship issues? For these and other
stressors, take a few minutes to check out a
new interactive website called “Stress Recess”
at http://www.cmhc.utexas.edu/stressrecess,
a component of the UT Counseling and Mental
Health Center. This site is loaded with
videos, animation, video games, body scans,
quizzes, clickable charts and graphics and
practical information tailored to YOU. Learn
what causes stress, signs of stress and—most
importantly---what you can do to manage stress
in healthy ways!
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