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Arrows of the Chace, vol. 2/2 / being a collection of scattered letters published chiefly in the daily newspapers 1840-1880 cover

Arrows of the Chace, vol. 2/2 / being a collection of scattered letters published chiefly in the daily newspapers 1840-1880

Chapter 99: FOOTNOTES:
By John Ruskin
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British LiteratureEssays, Letters & SpeechesHistory - Modern (1750+)Politics

About This Book

A collected set of public letters offers sustained commentary on political, economic, and cultural questions of the era. Subjects include foreign policy, war, and imperial unrest, as well as economic issues such as currency, supply and demand, wages, strikes, and the nature of wealth and property. Other pieces discuss infrastructure and industry, domestic service and housing, education, art and literary criticism, dress and women's work, and proposals for social and institutional reform. The epistolary form combines moral argument, practical policy suggestions, and cultural observation addressed to newspapers, public figures, and civic audiences.

[From "The Pall Mall Gazette," January 31, 1868.]
TRUE EDUCATION.[113]

To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."

Sir: The letter you published yesterday from a parish schoolboy of "Sixty Years Since" at Weary-faulds (confirmed as it would be doubtless in all practical respects by testimony of English boys educated at Waverley Honour) has my hearty sympathy; but I am wearier than any tenant of Weary-faulds of seeing this subject of education always treated as if "education" only meant teaching children to write or to cipher or to repeat catechism. You know, Sir, as you have shown by your comments on the Bishop of Oxford's last speech on this subject, and you could not at present use your influence more beneficially than by farther showing that the real education-the education which alone should be compulsory—means nothing of the kind. It means teaching children to be clean, active, honest, and useful. All these characters can be taught, and cannot be acquired by sickly and ill-dispositioned children without being taught; but they can be untaught to any extent, by evil habit and example at home. Public schools, in which the aim was to form character faithfully, would return to them in due time to their parents, worth more than their "weight in gold." That is the real answer to the objections founded on economical difficulties. Will you not make some effort, Sir, to get your readers to feel this? I am myself quite sick of saying it over and over again in vain.

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. Ruskin.

Denmark Hill, Jan. 31, 1868.

FOOTNOTES:

[113] The Pall Mall Gazette of January 27 contained a leader on "Compulsory Education," and that of January 29 one upon a speech of the Bishop of Oxford on the same subject, made at a meeting in connection with the National Society, held at Tunbridge Wells on the preceding day. In the Gazette of January 30 appeared a letter referring to these articles, headed "Sixty Years Ago," and signed "One who has walked four miles to the Parish School." It described the writer's early home, situate in some lowland parish north of the Tweed, and divided into five or six estates, such as "Whinny-hills" and "Weary-faulds," the lairds of which were shortly called "Whinny" or "Weary" after their properties. In this primitive village, where supervision, much less compulsion, in education was never heard of, "no child grew up without learning to read," and the morals of the parish were on the whole good; the children quarrelled, but did not steal.—The reader will remember that the second title of "Waverley" is "'Tis Sixty Years Since."