childish game, a marshalling of processions, a lust for
organisation. I care so intensely for what it all means, I loathe
so deeply the motives that seem at work. I suppose that the
ordinary man considers a species of success, a bettering of
himself, the acquisition of money and position and respectability,
to be the end of life; and such as these look upon education
primarily as a means of arriving at their object. Such was the old
education given by the sophists, which aimed at turning out a well-
balanced, effective man. But all this, it seems to me, has the
wrong end in view. The success of it depends upon the fact that
every one is not so capable of rising, that the rank and file must
be in the background, forming the material out of which the
successful man makes his combinations, and whom he contrives to
despoil.

The result of it is that the well-educated man becomes hard, brisk,
complacent, contemptuous, knowing his own worth, using his
equipment for precise and definite ends.

My idea would rather be that education should aim at teaching
people how to be happy without success; because the shadow of
success is vulgarity, and vulgarity is the one thing which
education ought to extinguish. What I desire is that men should
learn to see what is beautiful, to find pleasure in homely work, to
fill leisure with innocent enjoyment. If education, as the term is
generally used, were widely and universally successful, the whole
fabric of a nation would collapse, because no one thus educated
would acquiesce in the performance of humble work. It is commonly
said that education ought to make men dissatisfied, and teach them
to desire to improve their position. It is a pestilent heresy. It