Education And Killing Originality

Émile Faguet, The Cult of Incopmetence, tr. Beatrice Barstow (New York, 1914), ch. XI., Attempted Remedies, pp. 185-187:

The precocious development of early talent and originality is the thing which strangely terrifies these examination-maniacs. They have a horror of the man who teaches himself. They have a horror of any one who ventures to think for himself and to enquire for himself at twenty-five years of age. They want, like an old hen, to mother the young mind as long as possible. They will not let it find its own feet, till very late, and till, as the scoffer might well say, its limbs are absolutely atrophied. I do not say that they are wrong. The man who has taught himself is apt to be a vain, conceited fellow who takes pleasure in thinking for himself, and has an absolute delight in despising the thoughts of others. It is, however, no less the fact, that it is among these self-taught men that we find those vigorous spirits who venture boldly beyond the domain of human science and extend its frontier. The question then is which is best, to favour all these troublesome self-taught people in the hope of finding some good ones among them, or by crossing and worrying them to run the risk of destroying the good as well as the bad. I am myself strongly in favour of the first of these alternatives. It is better to let all go their own way, even though pretenders to originality come to grief, a thing that matters very little. Minds that are truly original will develop themselves and find room for the expansion of all their powers.

But here,—take note how the democratic spirit comes in everywhere—the question of numbers is raised. Ten times more numerous, I am told, are the pretenders to originality whom we save from themselves by discipline than the true geniuses whose wings we clip.

I reply that, in matters intellectual, questions of figures do not count. An original spirit strangled is a loss which is not compensated by the rescue of ten fools from worse excesses of folly. An original spirit left free to be himself is worth more than ten fools whose folly is partially restrained.

Nietzsche has well said: «Modern education consists in smothering the exceptional in favour of the normal. It consists in directing the mind away from the exceptional into the channel of the average.» This ought not to be. I do not say that education should do the opposite of all this. Oh no, far from that. It is not the business of education to look for exceptional genius, or to help in its creation. Exceptional genius is born of itself and it has no need of such assistance. But even less is it the business of education to regard the exceptional with terror, and to take every means possible, even the most barbarous and most detailed, to prevent it as long as possible from coming to the light.

Education ought to draw all that it can out of mediocrity, and to respect originality as much as it can. It ought never to attempt to turn mediocrity into originality, nor to reduce originality to the level of mediocrity.