The truth is that the wide-reaching purpose of University Extension will
seem visionary or practicable according to the conception formed of
education, as to what in education is essential and what accidental. If
I am asked whether I think of shop-assistants, porters, factory-hands,
miners, dock or agricultural laborers, women with families and constant
home duties, as classes of people who can be turned into economists,
physicists, literary critics, art connoisseurs,--I admit that I have no
such idea. But I do believe, or rather, from my experience in England I
know, that all such classes can be _interested_ in economic, scientific,
literary and artistic questions. And I say boldly that to interest in
intellectual pursuits is the essential of education, in comparison with
which all other educational purposes must be called secondary. I do not
consider that a child has been taught to read unless he has been made to
like reading; I find it difficult to think of a man as having received a
classical education if the man, however scholarly, leaves college with
no interest in classical literature such as will lead him to go on
reading for himself. In education the interest is the life. If a system
of instruction gives discipline, method, and even originating power,
without rousing a lasting love for the subject studied, the whole
process is but a mental galvanism, generating a delusive activity that
ceases when the connection between instructor and pupil is broken off.
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