[BNP/E3, 79A – 86-88]
X – Stupendous Nonsense – Alexander Search
F. Pessôa.
= The Disadvantages of Education = 1904
There are not many things, outside those hence excluded as boyish or sarcastic, which can be urged as reasons against education. But, as there is nothing so good, that it contain no fault, education, whatever its advantages, has, upon inspection, some drawbacks; not great faults indeed, in one sense, but, in another, of a somewhat grievous character.
The principal disadvantage of modern education is its tendency to suppress or discourage original thought. We hold, and ever will hold, what the man is intellectually hopeless who cannot see in Nature the original expression, the great storehouse, of human thought – the being we say is lost who cannot refer human passion and human action, human thought and human expression to the variedness of the around. Since thought and human expression to the variedness of the around. Since the earliest days of the world, since the remotest, eras, half-lost in fable, what one man has thought, every man has thought; and though it may seem a strange and a contemptible idea to the educated man, we shall assert with truth, that any man, by looking intelligently, expectantly on Nature, will find nothing new in the varied works of Shakespeare, nothing unusual even in the aethereal perambulations of the Miltonic genius.
For so far do we hold it true that all men think alike that we refuse to allow Shakespeare a shred more of genius than we allow Byron, than we allow Gray – all thought the same things, all grieved over human woes, all faced, each on his characteristic manner, the dark problem of existence. It is the power of expression that determines the
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greatness of a poet; it is the power of expression of those very thoughts that places Shakespeare above Milton, Milton above Byron, and Byron above Gray. In the first of these, Nature found her true expression, irregular, void and unforced. In the second, her dictates and her inspirations, huge and astonishing, were shaped and idealized beneath the edges of the poetical burin. In the third, Thought, or Nature (for these are the same) were ever far above expression, or constraining it to irregularities neither natural nor poetical. In the fourth, Nature, or, we should say, that part of Nature he found he could express, found vent in language so lofty or so simple that only by the art can we ascertain the author of several pieces of both kinds to be the same.
A man accustomed to read, but not to think, will only see half the meaning of a book; to the man who looks well on Nature no book ought to seem as if he could not write it.
What makes the difference between two men’s ways of expressing their thoughts is their different characters, which can give to the same thought clothing so various that the thought appears not the same.
Having delineated the principal charge against education, we pass over smaller ones. Many of these charges are, certainly, not general, but refer only to special minds.
Since not other general fault of importance can be found in the present educational system, yet we often stumble against particular faults – faults, I mean, only in some cases.
The most important of these is the somewhat bad effect of education on people of the lower classes. The educated man, it will be allowed,[1]
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seeks to put himself, by virtue of his learning, on the level of a man too often not so well educated who moves in what is termed a higher sphere of life. The consequences of this are, of course, unpleasant. There is, on the one side, the upward struggle of the educated person of lowly birth; on the other side the contrary exertion and the loftiness of the nobleman. Nor do we know anything to be more unjust or revolting than the scorn and the snubbing of the fool whom Fortune has placed among what the world calls the higher few to the man of education or to the man of genius. Rousseau felt in his condition of valet, and Brieux has, in his “Blanchette”, depicted another side of such a person’s misery. This the familiarity and equal feeling of those of lowly birth but whom education has not blesses. And if anything there be more revolting to the educated, meanly born man than the snubs of the noble it is surely the familiarity of the uncultured fool, always too ready to point out the equality of station and the uselessness of education.
Other disadvantages might be found, but, as these are but particular, we are glad to terminate in declaring that we would rather look on the advantages of education, which, it needs not to be said, are manifold and supreme.
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Saudade – Cebola
O grande mal moderno – a aspiração.
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[2] F. Pessôa F. Pessôa F. Pessôa F. Pessôa F. Pessôa
