The Crowd - Gustave le Bon (classic fiction .txt) 📗

vigour at the present day among the

nations who rule the world by their force of will, their

initiative, and their spirit of enterprise. In a series of

remarkable pages, whose principal passages I reproduce further

on, a great thinker, M. Taine, has clearly shown that our former

system of education was approximately that in vogue to-day in

England and America, and in a remarkable parallel between the

Latin and Anglo-Saxon systems he has plainly pointed out the

consequences of the two methods.

 

One might consent, perhaps, at a pinch, to continue to accept all

the disadvantages of our classical education, although it

produced nothing but discontented men, and men unfitted for their

station in life, did the superficial acquisition of so much

knowledge, the faultless repeating by heart of so many

textbooks, raise the level of intelligence. But does it really

raise this level? Alas, no! The conditions of success in life

are the possession of judgment, experience, initiative, and

character—qualities which are not bestowed by books. Books are

dictionaries, which it is useful to consult, but of which it is

perfectly useless to have lengthy portions in one’s head.

 

How is it possible for professional instruction to develop the

intelligence in a measure quite beyond the reach of classical

instruction? This has been well shown by M. Taine.

 

“Ideas, he says, are only formed in their natural and normal

surroundings; the promotion of the growth is effected by the

innumerable impressions appealing to the senses which a young man

receives daily in the workshop, the mine, the law court, the

study, the builder’s yard, the hospital; at the sight of tools,

materials, and operations; in the presence of customers, workers,

and labour, of work well or ill done, costly or lucrative. In

such a way are obtained those trifling perceptions of detail of

the eyes, the ear, the hands, and even the sense of smell, which,

picked up involuntarily, and silently elaborated, take shape

within the learner, and suggest to him sooner or, later this or

that new combination, simplification, economy, improvement, or

invention. The young Frenchman is deprived, and precisely at the

age when they are most fruitful, of all these precious contacts,

of all these indispensable elements of assimilation. For seven

or eight years on end he is shut up in a school, and is cut off

from that direct personal experience which would give him a keen

and exact notion of men and things and of the various ways of

handling them.”

 

” … At least nine out of ten have wasted their time and pains

during several years of their life—telling, important, even

decisive years. Among such are to be counted, first of all, the

half or two-thirds of those who present themselves for

examination—I refer to those who are rejected; and then among

those who are successful, who obtain a degree, a certificate, a

diploma, there is still a half or two-thirds—I refer to the

overworked. Too much has been demanded of them by exacting that

on a given day, on a chair or before a board, they should, for

two hours in succession, and with respect to a group of sciences,

be living repertories of all human knowledge. In point of fact

they were that, or nearly so, for two hours on that particular

day, but a month later they are so no longer. They could not go

through the examination again. Their too numerous and too

burdensome acquisitions slip incessantly from their mind, and are

not replaced. Their mental vigour has declined, their fertile

capacity for growth has dried up, the fully-developed man

appears, and he is often a used-up man. Settled down, married,

resigned to turning in a circle, and indefinitely in the same

circle, he shuts himself up in his confined function, which he

fulfils adequately, but nothing more. Such is the average yield:

assuredly the receipts do not balance the expenditure. In

England or America, where, as in France previous to 1789, the

contrary proceeding is adopted, the outcome obtained is equal or

superior.”

 

The illustrious psychologist subsequently shows us the difference

between our system and that of the Anglo-Saxons. The latter do

not possess our innumerable special schools. With them

instruction is not based on book-learning, but on object lessons.

The engineer, for example, is trained in a workshop, and never at

a school; a method which allows of each individual reaching the

level his intelligence permits of. He becomes a workman or a

foreman if he can get no further, an engineer if his aptitudes

take him as far. This manner of proceeding is much more

democratic and of much greater benefit to society than that of

making the whole career of an individual depend on an

examination, lasting a few hours, and undergone at the age of

nineteen or twenty.

 

“In the hospital, the mine, the factory, in the architect’s or

the lawyer’s office, the student, who makes a start while very

young, goes through his apprenticeship, stage by stage, much as

does with us a law clerk in his office, or an artist in his

studio. Previously, and before making a practical beginning, he

has had an opportunity of following some general and summary

course of instruction, so as to have a framework ready prepared

in which to store the observations he is shortly to make.

Furthermore he is able, as a rule, to avail himself of sundry

technical courses which he can follow in his leisure hours, so as

to co-ordinate step by step the daily experience he is gathering.

Under such a system the practical capabilities increase and

develop of themselves in exact proportion to the faculties of the

student, and in the direction requisite for his future task and

the special work for which from now onwards he desires to fit

himself. By this means in England or the United States a young

man is quickly in a position to develop his capacity to the

utmost. At twenty-five years of age, and much sooner if the

material and the parts are there, he is not merely a useful

performer, he is capable also of spontaneous enterprise; he is

not only a part of a machine, but also a motor. In France, where

the contrary system prevails—in France, which with each

succeeding generation is falling more and more into line with

China—the sum total of the wasted forces is enormous.”

 

The great philosopher arrives at the following conclusion with

respect to the growing incongruity between our Latin system of

education and the requirements of practical life:—

 

“In the three stages of instruction, those of childhood,

adolescence and youth, the theoretical and pedagogic preparation

by books on the school benches has lengthened out and become

overcharged in view of the examination, the degree, the diploma,

and the certificate, and solely in this view, and by the worst

methods, by the application of an unnatural and anti-social

regime, by the excessive postponement of the practical

apprenticeship, by our boarding-school system, by artificial

training and mechanical cramming, by overwork, without thought

for the time that is to follow, for the adult age and the

functions of the man, without regard for the real world on which

the young man will shortly be thrown, for the society in which we

move and to which he must be adapted or be taught to resign

himself in advance, for the struggle in which humanity is

engaged, and in which to defend himself and to keep his footing

he ought previously to have been equipped, armed, trained, and

hardened. This indispensable equipment, this acquisition of more

importance than any other, this sturdy common sense and nerve and

will-power our schools do not procure the young Frenchman; on the

contrary, far from qualifying him for his approaching and

definite state, they disqualify him. In consequence, his entry

into the world and his first steps in the field of action are

most often merely a succession of painful falls, whose effect is

that he long remains wounded and bruised, and sometimes disabled

for life. The test is severe and dangerous. In the course of it

the mental and moral equilibrium is affected, and runs the risk

of not being re-established. Too sudden and complete disillusion

has supervened. The deceptions have been too great, the

disappointments too keen.”[12]

 

[12] Taine, “Le Regime moderne,” vol. ii., 1894. These pages are

almost the last that Taine wrote. They resume admirably the

results of the great philosopher’s long experience.

Unfortunately they are in my opinion totally incomprehensible for

such of our university professors who have not lived abroad.

Education is the only means at our disposal of influencing to

some extent the mind of a nation, and it is profoundly saddening

to have to think that there is scarcely any one in France who can

arrive at understanding that our present system of teaching is a

grave cause of rapid decadence, which instead of elevating our

youth, lowers and perverts it.

 

A useful comparison may be made between Taine’s pages and the

observations on American education recently made by M. Paul

Bourget in his excellent book, “Outre-Mer.” He, too, after

having noted that our education merely produces narrow-minded

bourgeois, lacking in initiative and will-power, or

anarchists—“those two equally harmful types of the civilised

man, who degenerates into impotent platitude or insane

destructiveness”—he too, I say, draws a comparison that cannot

be the object of too much reflection between our French lycees

(public schools), those factories of degeneration, and the

American schools, which prepare a man admirably for life. The

gulf existing between truly democratic nations and those who have

democracy in their speeches, but in no wise in their thoughts, is

clearly brought out in this comparison.

 

Have we digressed in what precedes from the psychology of crowds?

Assuredly not. If we desire to understand the ideas and beliefs

that are germinating to-day in the masses, and will spring up

to-morrow, it is necessary to know how the ground has been

prepared. The instruction given the youth of a country allows of

a knowledge of what that country will one day be. The education

accorded the present generation justifies the most gloomy

previsions. It is in part by instruction and education that the

mind of the masses is improved or deteriorated. It was necessary

in consequence to show how this mind has been fashioned by the

system in vogue, and how the mass of the indifferent and the

neutral has become progressively an army of the discontented

ready to obey all the suggestions of utopians and rhetoricians.

It is in the schoolroom that socialists and anarchists are found

nowadays, and that the way is being paved for the approaching

period of decadence for the Latin peoples.