The decline and fall of the British Empire - University of Oregon

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38 The Decline and Fall blame. It is indeed ludicrous to read of the vast sums they spent upon education and the hopelessly inadequate returns which they got for their money. Let us first consider the National Schools, which were supposed to educate the masses. The largest proportion of the children in these schools were destined, presumably, to cultivate the land or to follow a handicraft but neither agriculture, carpentry, engineering, nor anything associated with practical industry, was taught them. The curriculum was, with few exceptions, a literary one. Young men from Oxford and Cambridge who had never ploughed a field nor even learned to mend their own bicycles, were appointed as inspectors and generally controlled the education of Britain's future agricultural labourers and artisans, with the result that the few farm
of the British Empire 39 labourers who existed took but little real interest in their work, and to sell newspapers or to do odd jobs was the sole ambition of millions who should have been skilled mechanics. Few persons could be more devoted to books than the writer of this humble volume, and he would be the last person in the world to deny a literary education to any one who desires it. But books are not the sole means of conveying instruction to the mind of youth. To love agriculture as a science or to under- stand the poetry of a steam engine is for thousands a truer source of inspiration than tales of bygone kings and the whisper of fairylands forlorn. It is futile to teach a farmer's boy a thousand and one facts of history against his will, and yet leave him ignorant of the nature of the earth, and the soil which he will have to plough. Teach him to
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