Jane Austen

Delaford is a nice place I can tell you; exactly what I call a nice, old-fashioned place, full of comforts, quite shut in with great garden-walls that are covered with fruit-trees, and such a mulberry-tree in the corner. Then there is a dovecote, some delightful fish-ponds, and a very pretty canal, and everything, in short, that one could wish for; and moreover it's close to the church and only a quarter of a mile from the turnpike road.--Sense and Sensibility

It was at Cambridge, England, I met him--a fine, intelligent clergyman he
was, too.

"He's not a 'Varsity man," said my new acquaintance, speaking of Doctor
Joseph Parker, the world's greatest preacher. "If he were, he wouldn't do
all these preposterous things, you know."

"He's a little like Henry Irving," I ventured apologetically.

"True, and what absurd mannerisms--did you ever see the like! Yes, one's
from Yorkshire and the other's from Cornwall, and both are Philistines."

He laughed at his little joke and so did I, for I always try to be polite.

So I went my way, and as I strolled it came to me that my clerical friend
was right--a university course might have taken all the individuality out
of these strong men and made of their genius a purely neutral decoction.
And when I thought further and considered how much learning has done to
banish wisdom, it was a satisfaction to remember that Shakespeare at
Oxford did nothing beyond making the acquaintance of an inn-keeper's wife.

It hardly seems possible that a Harvard degree would have made a stronger
man of Abraham Lincoln; or that Edison, whose brain has wrought greater
changes than that of any other man of the century, was the loser by not
being versed in physics as taught at Yale.

The Law of Compensation never rests, and the men who are taught too much
from books are not taught by Deity. Most education in the past has failed
to awaken in its subject a degree of intellectual consciousness. It is the
education that the Jesuits served out to the Indian. It made him
peaceable, but took all dignity out of him. From a noble red man he
descended into a dirty Injun, who signed away his heritage for rum.

The world's plan of education has mostly been priestly--we have striven to
inculcate trust and reverence. We have cited authorities and quoted
precedents and given examples: it was a matter of memory; while all the
time the whole spiritual acreage was left untilled.

A race educated in this way never advances, save as it is jolted out of
its notions by men with either a sublime ignorance of, or an indifference
to, what has been done and said. These men are always called barbarians by
their contemporaries: they are jeered and hooted. They supply much mirth
by