Back to Methuselah | Page 4

a disease or
a symptom, inoculate you with that disease or give you a drug that
produces that symptom, in order to provoke you to resist it as the mud
provokes the cat to wash itself.
Now an acute person will ask me why, if this be so, our false education
does not provoke our scholars to find out the truth. My answer is that it
sometimes does. Voltaire was a pupil of the Jesuits; Samuel Butler was
the pupil of a hopelessly conventional and erroneous country parson.
But then Voltaire was Voltaire, and Butler was Butler: that is, their
minds were so abnormally strong that they could throw off the doses of
poison that paralyse ordinary minds. When the doctors inoculate you
and the homeopathists dose you, they give you an infinitesimally
attenuated dose. If they gave you the virus at full strength it would
overcome your resistance and produce its direct effect. The doses of
false doctrine given at public schools and universities are so big that
they overwhelm the resistance that a tiny dose would provoke. The
normal student is corrupted beyond redemption, and will drive the
genius who resists out of the country if he can. Byron and Shelley had
to fly to Italy, whilst Castlereagh and Eldon ruled the roost at home.
Rousseau was hunted from frontier to frontier; Karl Marx starved in

exile in a Soho lodging; Ruskin's articles were refused by the
magazines (he was too rich to be otherwise persecuted); whilst
mindless forgotten nonentities governed the land; sent men to the
prison or the gallows for blasphemy and sedition (meaning the truth
about Church and State); and sedulously stored up the social disease
and corruption which explode from time to time in gigantic boils that
have to be lanced by a million bayonets. This is the result of allopathic
education. Homeopathic education has not yet been officially tried, and
would obviously be a delicate matter if it were. A body of
schoolmasters inciting their pupils to infinitesimal peccadilloes with the
object of provoking them to exclaim, 'Get thee behind me, Satan,' or
telling them white lies about history for the sake of being contradicted,
insulted, and refuted, would certainly do less harm than our present
educational allopaths do; but then nobody will advocate homeopathic
education. Allopathy has produced the poisonous illusion that it
enlightens instead of darkening. The suggestion may, however, explain
why, whilst most people's minds succumb to inculcation and
environment, a few react vigorously: honest and decent people coming
from thievish slums, and sceptics and realists from country parsonages.
THE DIABOLICAL EFFICIENCY OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION
But meanwhile--and here comes the horror of it--our technical
instruction is honest and efficient. The public schoolboy who is
carefully blinded, duped, and corrupted as to the nature of a society
based on profiteering, and is taught to honor parasitic idleness and
luxury, learns to shoot and ride and keep fit with all the assistance and
guidance that can be procured for him by the most anxiously sincere
desire that he may do these things well, and if possible superlatively
well. In the army he learns to fly; to drop bombs; to use machine-guns
to the utmost of his capacity. The discovery of high explosives is
rewarded and dignified: instruction in the manufacture of the weapons,
battleships, submarines, and land batteries by which they are applied
destructively, is quite genuine: the instructors know their business, and
really mean the learners to succeed. The result is that powers of
destruction that could hardly without uneasiness be entrusted to infinite
wisdom and infinite benevolence are placed in the hands of romantic

schoolboy patriots who, however generous by nature, are by education
ignoramuses, dupes, snobs, and sportsmen to whom fighting is a
religion and killing an accomplishment; whilst political power, useless
under such circumstances except to militarist imperialists in chronic
terror of invasion and subjugation, pompous tufthunting fools,
commercial adventurers to whom the organization by the nation of its
own industrial services would mean checkmate, financial parasites on
the money market, and stupid people who cling to the status quo
merely because they are used to it, is obtained by heredity, by simple
purchase, by keeping newspapers and pretending that they are organs of
public opinion, by the wiles of seductive women, and by prostituting
ambitious talent to the service of the profiteers, who call the tune
because, having secured all the spare plunder, they alone can afford to
pay the piper. Neither the rulers nor the ruled understand high politics.
They do not even know that there is such a branch of knowledge as
political science; but between them they can coerce and enslave with
the deadliest efficiency, even to the wiping out of civilization, because
their education as slayers has been honestly and thoroughly carried out.
Essentially the