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A response to Michael Gove

William Hazlitt

Anyone who has passed through the regular graduations of a classical
education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a
very narrow escape. It is an old remark, that boys who shine at school do not
make the greatest figure when they grown up and come out into the world.
The things, in fact, which a boy is set to learn at school, and on which his
success depends, are things which do not require the exercise either of the
highest or the most useful faculties of the mind. Memory (and that of the
lowest kind) is the chief faculty called into play, in conning over and
repeating lessons by rote in grammar, in languages, in geography, arithmetic,
etc., so that he who has the most of this technical memory, with the least turn
for other things, which have a stronger and more natural claim upon his
childish attention, will make the most forward schoolboy. . . .

There is indeed a degree of stupidity which prevents children from learning
the usual lessons, or ever arriving at these puny academic honours. But what
passes for stupidity is much oftener a want of interest, of a sufficient motive
to fix the attention, and force a reluctant application to the dry and
unmeaning pursuits of school-learning. The best capacities are as much above
this drudgery, as the dullest are beneath it. Our men of the greatest genius
have not been most distinguished for their acquirements at school or at the
university.

From The Ignorance of the Learned, 1818

 

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