arrives, you apply your general ideas wrongly, you judge men and
things from a wrong standpoint, you see them in a wrong light, and
treat them in a wrong way. So it is that education perverts the mind.

This explains why it so frequently happens that, after a long course
of learning and reading, we enter upon the world in our youth, partly
with an artless ignorance of things, partly with wrong notions about
them; so that our demeanor savors at one moment of a nervous anxiety,
at another of a mistaken confidence. The reason of this is simply that
our head is full of general ideas which we are now trying to turn to
some use, but which we hardly ever apply rightly. This is the result
of acting in direct opposition to the natural development of the mind
by obtaining general ideas first, and particular observations last:
it is putting the cart before the horse. Instead of developing the
child's own faculties of discernment, and teaching it to judge and
think for itself, the teacher uses all his energies to stuff its head
full of the ready-made thoughts of other people. The mistaken views
of life, which spring from a false application of general ideas, have
afterwards to be corrected by long years of experience; and it is
seldom that they are wholly corrected. This is why so few men of
learning are possessed of common-sense, such as is often to be met
with in people who have had no instruction at all.

_To acquire a knowledge of the world_ might be defined as the aim
of all education; and it follows from what I have said that special
stress should be laid upon beginning to acquire this knowledge _at
the right end_. As I have shown, this means, in the main, that the
particular observation of a thing shall precede the general idea of
it; further, that narrow and circumscribed ideas shall come before
ideas of a wide range. It means, therefore, that the whole system of