Perhaps the worst evil from which the world suffers in an educational sense is the misplaced individual. Nothing is more tragic, and yet nothing is more common, than to see men occupying positions for which they are unfitted by nature and therefore by inclination; whilst it is obvious that, had the circumstances of their early training been different, they might have followed with success and pleasure a natural bent of mind tending in a wholly opposite direction.

This miscarriage of vocation is one of the greatest causes of individual misery in this world that exists; but its pernicious effects go far beyond mere personal unhappiness: they exercise the most baneful influence upon society at large, upon the progress of nations, and upon the development of the human race. One of the advantages of the division of labour which is most emphasized by political economists is that it offers a fair field for personal adaptation. People select the particular employment for which they are most fitted, and in this way everybody in the community is engaged in doing the best and most useful work of which he is capable.

It is a fine theory. Perhaps in olden times, before the introduction of education systems, it may have worked well in regard to most trades and industries. A man had then at least some opportunity of developing a natural bent. He was not taken by the State almost from infancy, crammed with useless knowledge, and totally unfitted for any employment within his reach. The object was not to educate him above his station and then make a clerk of him, or drive him into the lower branches of the Civil Service. A bright youth was apprenticed by his father to some trade for which he may have shown some predisposition.

Of course, mistakes were often made through the stupidity of parents or from some other cause. There are many such examples to be met with in the biographies of men who attained eminence in wholly different callings from those into which they were forced in their youth.

Sir William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, and who first conceived the generally-accepted theory as to the cause of sun-spots, was brought up by his father to be a musician. In spite of his predilection for astronomy, he continued to earn his bread by playing the oboe, until he was promoted from being a performer in the Pump Room at Bath to the position of Astronomer Royal.

Faraday was apprenticed by his father to a bookbinder, and he remained in this distasteful employment until he was twenty-two. It was quite by accident that somebody more intelligent than Michael Faraday’s pastors and masters discovered that the youth had a great natural love of studying science, and sent him to hear a course of lectures delivered by Sir Humphry Davy. This led happily to the young bookbinder making the acquaintance of the lecturer, and eventually obtaining a position as assistant in the Royal Institution.

Linnaeus, the great naturalist, had a very narrow escape from missing his proper vocation. He was sent to a grammar-school, but exhibited no taste for books; therefore his father decided to apprentice him to a shoemaker. Fortunately, however, a discriminating physician had observed the boy’s love of natural history, and took him into his own house to teach him botany and physiology.

Instances of the kind might be multiplied. Milton himself began life as a schoolmaster, and the father of Turner, one of the greatest landscape painters who ever lived, did his best to turn his brilliant son into a barber. The point, however, is obvious enough without the need of further illustration. A few examples have been adduced of great geniuses who have contrived, by the accident of circumstances or through sheer force of character, to escape from an environment which was forced upon them against their natural inclination. But it is not everybody who is gifted with such commanding talent and so much obstinacy and perseverance as to be able to overcome the artificial obstacles placed in the way of his individual tendencies; and now we have, what happily did not exist in the day of Herschel, Faraday, Turner, Linnaeus and others a compulsory education system to strangle originality and natural development at the earliest possible stage.

Most people would probably find it far easier to quote instances offhand of friends who had missed their proper vocation in life than of those who were placed exactly in the position best suited to their taste and capacity. The failures in life are so obviously in excess of those who may be said to have succeeded that specific illustrations of the fact are hardly necessary.

One has only to exert ordinary powers of observation to perceive that the world is not at all well ordered in this respect. It has already been pointed out that the public service and the professions are almost entirely filled with what must be called mediocrity; and one of the most potent causes of this unhappy state of affairs is the exquisite infallibility with which a blind system is constantly forcing square pegs into round holes.

Every profession and calling teems with examples. There are men, intended by nature to be artists and musicians, leading a wretched and unnatural existence in many a merchant’s office because their best faculties were undeveloped during the early years of schooling. Mathematicians, philosophers, even poets, are tied to trade or to some equally unsuitable occupation. Scores of so-called literary men ought to be calculating percentages or selling dry goods; and no doubt there are shop-assistants and stock-jobbers who might, if led into the path of culture, have become creditable authors and journalists.

This is neither joke nor satire. It is sober earnest, as many observant readers will readily testify. The loss is not only to the individual, it is to society at large, and to the whole world. No one will deny the fact; but to how many will it occur that such anomalies cannot be the outcome of natural development and progress, but that they must be directly or indirectly attributable to some artificial cause?

It is the great difficulty against which all human advancement has to contend, that people can rarely be brought to question principles which have become a part and parcel of their everyday existence. There are plenty of individuals who are ready to tinker with existing institutions, and who erroneously dignify that process by the name of reform. But nothing is more despairing than the effort to convince conventionally brought up people that some cherished convention, with which the world has put up for an indefinite period, is founded upon fallacy, and ought to be cast out root and branch.

Even in the United States, where far greater efforts are made to encourage individuality in the schools and colleges than is the case with the countries of the Old World, people are not much better distributed amongst the various professions and occupations than they are here. I have made inquiries amongst Americans of wide experience and observation, and have learnt that nothing is more common in the States than to find individuals brought up to exercise functions for which they are wholly unfitted by natural capacity and inclination.

An instance was given me, by an American friend, of a boy who spent all his leisure in constructing clever little mechanical contrivances, in running miniature locomotives, and in setting up electric appliances of one kind and another. One day the youth’s father came to him and said: ’I don’t know what to make of B . Could you find him a place in a wholesale merchant’s office?’ When it was pointed out to the parent that his son showed unmistakable mechanical genius, he obstinately insisted on getting the boy a situation for which he was quite unsuited, and which was highly distasteful to him.

I quote this instance to show that the parent is often as bad an educator as the school itself. In this case the school would have taken as little notice of the boy’s natural bent as his father. It would, in all probability, never have discovered it at all. But it has become so much an accepted axiom that children are to be manufactured into anything that happens to suit the taste or convenience of their guardians, that it probably never occurred to the parent in question that he was committing a cruel and foolish act in forcing his son out of the path into which the boy’s natural instinct was guiding him. The youth who might have pursued a happy and prosperous career as a mechanical engineer is now a disappointed man, struggling on, with little hope of success, in an occupation which does not interest him, and for which he does not possess the slightest adaptability.

Every nation is equally at fault in this respect. In Germany, for instance, the child is quite as much a pawn at the disposal of its parent and the school system as it is elsewhere. I spent a number of years in the country, and enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with many German families. Nothing has left upon my mind a deeper impression than the tragedy I witnessed of a boy being gradually and systematically weaned from the pursuit to which he was passionately devoted, and forced into a career utterly unsympathetic and distasteful to his peculiar temperament.

The boy was simply, from head to foot, a musician. He spent every moment he could steal from his school studies in playing through the difficult scores of Wagner’s music dramas. His taste, his musical memory, the enormous natural ability which enabled him to surmount all technical difficulties with ease, were apparent to everybody who knew him. Yet his parents determined from the first that he should study law, and enter the legal profession.

I have never seen anything more painful than the deliberate discouragement, during a period extending over several years, of the boy’s natural bent, and the application of absolute compulsion to force him, against every natural instinct, to prepare himself for a profession repugnant to his inclinations, and for which he was not in the smallest degree adapted.

Out of this promising musical material the Stadt Gymnasium manufactured the usual piece of intellectual mediocrity. He was stuffed with the regulation measure of facts, scraped through the customary examination, and was despatched, much against his will, to the universities of Jena and Zuerich. When I last saw him he was a plodding lawyer of the conventional type, doing his duties in a listless manner, with very indifferent success, and quite broken down in spirit. The Gymnasium, the university, and the parental obstinacy had done their work very effectually. They had succeeded in reducing him to the level of a machine, and in all probability Germany lost an excellent musician who might have given pleasure to thousands of others, besides enjoying an honourable career of useful and congenial work.

We have seen that between the stupidity of the parent and the inflexibility of the school system children have little chance of developing their natural propensities. The results surround us everywhere, and there is no getting away from them. All that the school professes to do is to stuff the pupil with a certain quantity of facts according to a fixed curriculum. It does not pretend to exercise any other function. There is no effort to differentiate between individuals, or to discover the natural bent of each particular child. Instruction consists in cramming and prescribing by a more or less pernicious method according to the lights of the particular school authorities in some cases, and in others according to a hard and fast code enforced by the State a certain quantity of facts into all pupils without distinction.

Parents, on the other hand, think they have fulfilled their duty simply by sending their children to school. The only thing considered necessary to equip a child for the battle of life is to get him an education, and nobody bothers his head about the principles or the effects of the process. The parent leaves everything to the school, regardless of the fact that schools do not pretend to concern themselves about the natural tendencies of their pupils. He is satisfied if his son is receiving the same education as his neighbour’s, and is quite contented to leave the question of his future career to be an after-consideration.

The result upon the world in general of this double neglect on the part of parents and school systems is disastrous in the extreme. In the first place, it makes the life of the misplaced individual a burden to himself and to those by whom he is surrounded. Natural tendencies cannot be wholly suppressed, even by education systems; and the victim’s existence is not rendered more bearable by the reflection that, but for circumstances which he is rarely able to analyze, he might have succeeded in some other and more agreeable occupation had he only received the necessary encouragement in his youth.

Secondly, there is the fact that the progress of civilization is enormously retarded by its being rarely in the hands of the most fit. The most fit are not, and cannot be, produced under prevailing conditions. The whole machinery of education is directed towards the production of a dead level of mediocrity. In many cases such as, for example, in Prussia this is done by design, and not by accident. Instruction is imparted in such a manner that no regard is paid to individual propensities. All are subjected, more or less, to the same process. They are fitted for nothing in particular, and no trouble is taken to ascertain the direction in which an individual mind should be developed. The consequence is that, from one end of the civilized world to the other, resounds the cry, ‘What shall we do with our boys?’

And, lastly, it scarcely requires pointing out that the enormous sums of money spent by Governments, by municipalities, and by private persons upon education, in order to produce this lamentable state of affairs, is so much waste and extravagance. Not only does it bring in no practical return, but it works out in a precisely opposite direction. Schools and colleges that only serve to produce anomalous and unnatural social conditions, that stifle genius and talent, and that cause widespread misery among the unsuitably educated, must be reckoned as a national loss.

People deplore the heavy sums spent on armaments and on the maintenance of enormous fleets and armies; but it may be doubted if this expenditure is as costly in the end as that which goes to support a systematic manufacture of the unfit, and to assist in the distribution of individuals to stations in the social scheme for which they are wholly unsuited.