Cardinal Newman and the Function of Education

Extract

‘If all the nonsense which, in the past quarter of a century, has been talked on all other subjects were thrown into one scale, and all that has been talked on the subject of education alone were thrown into the other, I think the latter would preponderate.’

This sweeping statement—which I borrow as a useful diving-board, a plank from which I may comfortably plunge in medias res, is not my own. Neither would I have it thought that I identify myself with the opinion so tartly expressed, nor held to be casting any undeserved reflection on the writers who, during the course of the present century, have dealt so laboriously and so voluminously with educational principles and theories. Education is proverbially a dull subject. It is also a subject on which every man thinks he has something to say. Naturally, therefore, it becomes the focus of a considerable amount of dull nonsense—dull because only the man of practical experience can find, or make it, interesting—nonsense because it is pre-eminently a subject in which the apparently obvious is most often wrong.

My words are a quotation. The novelist, Thomas Love Peacock, in whom there has lately been a revival of interest, puts them into the mouth of that estimable and excellent clergyman, Dr. Opimian, the most charming character in that most charming novel Gryll Grange, which was the fruit of the Indian summer of its author’s genius. Peacock wrote this novel in 1860 after many years of silence.