Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/224

188 and painfully drummed into us, contrary to the principle of education—give food only to him who hungers after it; when we had mathematics and physics forced upon us, instead of being first led forth to the despair of ignorance and having one limited everyday life, our transactions and everything happening in the house, the workshop, in the sky and the landscape, from morning till night, dissected into thousands of problems, of harassing, mortifying, irritating problems—in order afterwards to be shown that our desires first of all require a mathematical and mechanical knowledge, and then to be taught the first scientific delight in the absolute logic of this knowledge. If only we had been inspired with reverence for these branches of science, if but once our souls had been made to tremble at the struggles and defeats and the ever-renewal contests of the great, at the martyrdom which is the history of pure science! On the contrary, the breath of a certain irreverence for the true branches of science breathed upon us in favour of history, “formal education" and “classicism." And we allowed ourselves to be so easily deceived! Formal education! Might we not have pointed to the best teachers of our high-schools, jocosely asking: "Are these then the receptacles of former education? And if they lack it, how are they to teach it?" Classicism, indeed! Did we learn any portion of that in which the ancients used to educate their youth? Did we learn to speak or to write as