Publisher's Announcement
A NOTABLE BOOK
DRIFTING
Crown 8vo., cloth, 2s. 6d.
THIRD EDITION
'An able and suggestive book.'—The Spectator.
'It is a sane, healthy indication of the weak spots in the country'sarmour, and a practical attempt to indicate remedies.'—The SundaySpecial.
'The author's contempt for the time-serving politician, who in thiscountry has, unfortunately, come to count for so much in allgovernments—Tory or Liberal—will be shared by the thinking portion ofhis fellow countrymen.'—The Financial News.
'By such suggestions the author of "Drifting" does good service to thecountry.'—The Outlook.
LONDON: GRANT RICHARDS
9, Henrietta Street, W.C.
BY
HAROLD E. GORST
London
Grant Richards
1901
In calling this little book 'The Curse of Education,' I trust that Ishall not be misunderstood to disparage culture. The term 'education' isused, for want of a better word, to express the conventional mode ofteaching and bringing up children, and of educating youth in this andother civilized countries. It is with education systems, with theuniversal method of cramming the mind with facts, and particularly withthe manufacture of uniformity and mediocrity by subjecting everyindividual to a common process, regardless of his natural bent, that Ihave chiefly to find fault. At a moment when the country is agitatedwith questions of educational reform, I thought it might be useful todraw attention to what I believe to be a fact, namely, that thefoundations of all existing education systems are absolutely[Pg vi] false inprinciple; and that teaching itself, as opposed to natural developmentand self-culture, is the greatest obstacle to human progress that socialevolution has ever had to encounter.
HAROLD E. GORST.
London,
April, 1901.