much younger one to help him. The younger paid nothing for
instruction, but the elder took the work, as long as the relation
of master and pupil existed between them. I, then, was making
illustrations for this book, and got Jones to help me. I let him
see what I was doing, and derive an idea of the sort of thing I
wanted, and then left him alone--beyond giving him the same kind of
small criticism that I expected from himself--but I appropriated
his work. That is the way to teach, and the result was that in an
incredibly short time Jones could draw. The taking the work is a
sine qua non. If I had not been going to have his work, Jones, in
spite of all his quickness, would probably have been rather slower
in learning to draw. Being paid in money is nothing like so good.

This is the system of apprenticeship versus the academic system.
The academic system consists in giving people the rules for doing
things. The apprenticeship system consists in letting them do it,
with just a trifle of supervision. "For all a rhetorician's
rules," says my great namesake, "teach nothing, but to name his
tools;" and academic rules generally are much the same as the
rhetorician's. Some men can pass through academies unscathed, but
they are very few, and in the main the academic influence is a
baleful one, whether exerted in a university or a school. While
young men at universities are being prepared for their entry into
life, their rivals have already entered it. The most university
and examination ridden people in the world are the Chinese, and
they are the least progressive.

Men should learn to draw as they learn conveyancing: they should
go into a painter's studio and paint on his pictures. I am told
that half the conveyances in the country are drawn by pupils; there