15. Eye versus Ear

It is admitted on all hands by this time, I suppose, that the best way
of learning is by eye, not by ear. Therefore the authorities that
prescribe for us our education among all classes have decided that we
shall learn by ear, not by eye. Which is just what one might expect from
a vested interest.

Of course this superiority of sight over hearing is pre-eminently true
of natural science--that is to say, of nine-tenths among the subjects
worth learning by humanity. The only real way to learn geology, for
example, is not to mug it up in a printed text-book, but to go into the
field with a geologist's hammer. The only real way to learn zoology and
botany is not by reading a volume of natural history, but by collecting,
dissecting, observing, preserving, and comparing specimens. Therefore,
of course, natural science has never been a favourite study in the eyes
of school-masters, who prefer those subjects which can be taught in a
room to a row of boys on a bench, and who care a great deal less than
nothing for any subject which isn't "good to examine in." Educational
value and importance in after life have been sacrificed to the teacher's
ease and convenience, or to the readiness with which the pupil's
progress can be tested on paper. Not what is best to learn, but what is
least trouble to teach in great squads to boys, forms the staple of our
modern English education. They call it "education," I observe in the
papers, and I suppose we must fall in with that whim of the profession.

But even the subjects which belong by rights to the ear can nevertheless
be taught by the eye more readily. Everybody knows how much easier it is
to get up the history and geography of a country when you are actually
in it than when you are merely reading about it. It lives and moves
before you. The places, the persons, the monuments, the events, all
become real to you. Each illustrates each, and each tends to impress the
other on the memory. Sight burns them into the brain without conscious
effort. You can learn more of Egypt and of Egyptian history, culture,
hieroglyphics, and language in a few short weeks at Luxor or Sakkarah
than in a year at the Louvre and the British Museum. The Tombs of the
Kings are worth many papyri. The mere sight of the temples and obelisks
and monuments and inscriptions, in the places where their makers
originally erected them, gives a sense of reality and interest to them
all that no amount of study under alien conditions can possibly equal.
We have all of us felt that the only place to observe Flemish art to the
greatest advantage is at Ghent and Bruges and Brussels and Antwerp; just
as the only place to learn Florentine art as it really was is at the
Uffizi and the Bargello.