An Essay in Education free essay sample

Carlyle regards  men without  education  as  mutilated  beings, and with great force insists that to deprive  men and women  of the  blessings of  education  is as bad as it would be to deprive them of eyes or hands. An uneducated  man may a indeed well be compared to a  blind man. The  blind manhas a very imperfect idea of  the world  in which he lives, as compared with those who have the use of their eyes, and the uneducated labour under a similar  inferiority  of mental vision. While the uneducated man has his mind  confined  to the narrow circle of such unintelligent labour as he is capable of performing,  the educated man  can look far back into the past and forward into the future. His mind is full of great events that happened long ago, about which history gives him information, and from his knowledge of the past he is able to form conjectures about the  social and political condition  to which  the world  is progressing. We will write a custom essay sample on An Essay in Education or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The uneducated man sees in the heavenly bodies, that illumine the sky by night,  nothing but innumerable specks of light, some more and some less bright. Any one who has learnt astronomy divides them into fixed stars and planets, and form in his mind a conception of the  planets of  the solar system  rolling round the sun, and of countless other greater suns than ours, each of which may have  its own planetary system, occupying the more distant realms of boundless space. By help of the telescope he can map out the seas and mountains of the moon and of the nearer planets, and the spectroscope tells him the elements of which the stars are composed, The botanist finds the plants at his feet and the trees above his head full of interest. The entomologist, zoologist and geologist enrich the stores of their minds by the study of insects, animals, and fossils. Indeed there is not one of the long list of modern sciences that does not open the eyes of the mind to wonders undreamt of by the uneducated man. Those who have no taste  for science  can enrich their minds with the literary wealth of ancient and modern times, and learn the thoughts of the greatest intellects of  the world  on all manner of subjects. If it is a pleasure to converse with the ordinary men we meet in everyday  life, how much greater is the privilege of reading in  books the  noblest thoughts of such great writers as  Plato, Milton, and Shakespeare. These writers of  world  wide fame, who are not of an age but for all time, are the delight of all  students of literature, and stand apart on the highest pinnacle of glory. But below the very  highest literary rank  there is in every language a large number of excellent writers, whose works are specially adapted to various readers of every age and of every  temperament, so that, whatever our intellectual tastes may be, we are sure to find satisfaction for them in the wide and varied field of  literature. Thus it is that  education, besides being of practical assistance to us in  the struggle of life, enlarges and ennobles the mind and enables us to live as beings endowed with human intellects ought to live.