The fine definition of education here given
has never been improved upon: "I call a complete and generous
education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and
magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and
war." This is the true Milton. When he offers, in another page, as an
equivalent definition of the true end of learning, "to repair the ruin
of our first parents by regaining to know God aright," we have the
theological Milton, and what he took on from the current language of
his age.
Milton saw strongly, as many have done before and since, one weak
point in the practice of schools, namely, the small result of much
time. He fell into the natural error of the inexperienced teacher,
that of supposing that the remedy was the ingestion of much and
diversified intelligible matter. It requires much observation of
young minds to discover that the rapid inculcation of unassimilated
information stupefies the faculties instead of training them. Is it
fanciful to think that in Edward Phillips, who was always employing
his superficial pen upon topics with which he snatched a fugitive
acquaintance, we have a concrete example of the natural result of the
Miltonic system of instruction?
CHAPTER V.
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