EDUCATED IGNORANCE.
" VOU'RE entirely wrong, Sir," said a very experienced editor 1. to a subordinate who objected to state some fact as being universally known, "you're entirely wrong. As a rule nobody ever knows anything." A writer in .Blackwood has collected this week several opinions deliberately given by educated men supporting the same apparent paradox. "Reads!" said Mr. Vardon, the Librarian of the House of Commons, to the member for Berkshire, "who reads anything ? Nobody reads anything here except Sir George Lewis and myself." "In truth," says Mr.
Walter, "after a man reaches a certain age there is very little reading of any sort." " I hold," says Mr. Wayte, a master at Eton, "that the average amount of information possessed by those who are called ' educated ' is very much less than is commonly supposed by writers in reviews and newspapers." There is not, perhaps, an active member, or school inspector, or other person forced into frequent grave talk with people whom he did not choose as acquaintances, who will not endorse these opinions with emphatic assent. "No Frenchman," says Mr. Matthew Arnold, "ever knows anything, except a few men in Paris who know more than all the rest of the world," and though Englishmen, from their less concentrated lives, are not quite so devoid of facts, still the amount of ignorance is something quite at variance with the ideas which the professional men of London who live very much among each other are apt to form. Most Englishmen, for instance, either are or profess to be interested in politics, talk about politics, and seem fairly acquainted with 'the data of political speculation. One-half of this readiness is, how- ever, merely a habit of fluency, the speaker or thinker having in fact lacunm in his facts, deep chasms in his knowledge which render accurate judgment quite impossible. Listen for five minutes to any group of "well educated" men discussing any financial topic whatever, and then admire the marvellous data which they will employ, not inventing them, but-thinking them quite correct. Ask one of those so engaged for the very first datum of all such speculations, the average expenditure of the country, and the answer in two cases out of three will be incorrect and in one absurd. It was but the other day that we heard an educated man, of much more than average intelligence, reasoning on'the assumption that the British Isles contained fifty millions of people. Yet, if a public writer stated the tree number as a fact, and not allusively, his own class would smile at his pedantry. How many men are there of those who seem to know politics who could give the faintest approxima- tion to an account of the sources of English revenue, while as to foreign countries the ignorance is almost perfect. A man thought capable of writing in the Times announced one day that "Prussia had joined the Zollverein," and the mass of the educated simply wondered why so much laughter was created by so very natural a blunder. Middle-class dinner tables have been infested for weeks with talk about Sviredish assistance to Denmark, yet we engage to say that, taking any club in London as the test, not one man in three of the talkers has any but the faintest idea of the real resources of Sweden, yet almost all publicists writing on the subject would assume that people in general knew the facts very well, and would in conversation set down those who did not know them as exception- ally ignorant. So with history. Modern ephemeral writing, being essentially allusive from the necessity of condensation, is crowded with allusions to historical facts. When a writer wants to say shortly that Mr. Bright is a dangerous demagogue he says he is a Gracchus. He thinks he is understood, and owing to a peculiar school training many readers think they understand him, but we undertake to say that of the hundred thousand who read the allusion, not two thousand have the faintest idea of what the Gracchi proposed, of the distinction be- between the two, or of anything else about them except that they had a mother who called them her jewels. An Eton boy would be thought frightfully ignorant who did not know the list of the English kings, but ask any average man to repeat it : we once heard a small roomful of really " educated " people, people any one of them eligible to the Athenmum, disputing on the Queen's pedigree, and -the historical hash they produced would have taught schoolmasters a new lesson. As to the history of foreign countries, France partially, and very partially excepted, the cultivated middle class of this country simply knows nothing about it, no more comprehends references to it than a labourer comprehends a reference to the binomial theorem. If they have ever read it they have forgotten it utterly, just as they have forgotten half the events which occurred in their own time. We remember once hearing quite a pathetic conversation upon the historic wrongs of Poland. Each speaker of three added his mite quite effectively, but it was evident all the while that no one of them had any idea that the "partition" was not a single act done in one year. People are always referring in newspapers to the "treaties of Vienna," but ask any average man of the classes for whom they write what those treaties secured. Ninety-nine in a hundred will not only not know, but will talk of the Treaty of Vienna as if the whole group of arrangements had been a sort of territorial Act of Parliament. As to Oriental history, the minds of most men retain nothing except a few names, not one in fifty having the faintest idea even as to the mode in which England
acquired any of her Asiatic possessions, except Bengal, and knowing that only because Macaulay happened to write a short and pictorial account of Clive's and Hastings' adventures. There were more than four hundred members in the House of Commons on Tuesday night when Mr. Cobden gave his account of the foundation of Singapore by Sir Stamford Raffles. We put it to the consciences of the majority—did not the statements that Singapore was on an island, that it was a free port, that it was founded by Sir Stamford Raffles, strike them as new information?
Of all assumptions, however, the assumption that educated people know much about the face of the world they live in is the most gross. As a rule the masses know nothing, the English peasantry, for example, not having an idea of any geography, and the educated very little indeed beyond a few names of places, and the general aspect of the map. They have very rarely an accurate notion of comparative size even in Europe ; we have seen men utterly astonished when compelled to ascertain the area of Sweden and Norway, and this very week heard a man who has passed his life in writing politics assert that Denmark, including
Schleswig-Holstein was twice the size of Scotland. It is smaller by eleven thousand square miles, and the fact was fatal to a whole chain of reasoning. As to the remaining continents, few people profess even to have any ideas on the matter, and listen to state- ments such as that Arabia is larger than Europe within the Vistula, and that the Argentine Republic covers the area of sixteen Englands, with a feeling very like incredulity. Who indeed really knows anything about the South American States, or dreams of assert- ing anything about them till he has "verified" his floating ideas ? Eng- lishmen know routes pretty well, for commerce has taught them those, but physical and political geography are still special studies, and people assume that a country is tropical in climate because within the tropics, or all desert because it has some desert, or deadly because it is in Africa, without attempting to verify the data on which they will none the less try to reason. At this moment the news- papers are writing pretty frequently about the cession of Lauen- burg, and the middle-class mind is gradually arriving at something like an opinion as to where Lauenburg is. But previous to the sitting of Conference the majority of well-informed people had never heard of Lauenburg, and we venture to say would at this moment give a wholly absurd account of the territorial divisions of Germany. The schoolboy who could not do it would be quoted as an example of bad instruction, but let any reader who doubts ask the next friend he meets to state the boundaries, or extent, or relative position of say such a state as Saxony. As to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, they know that "Turkey" is there, and the Holy Land, and that is pretty much all, and when pressed for details they take refuge in a free use of that most elastic of geo- graphical phrases, "the Levant."
It is, however, perhaps in theology that the popular ignorance is most extraordinary and yet the least perceived. There is scarcely a man or woman in England who does not talk a little theology, and eight-tenths certainly base that theology on the Bible ; yet outside of the clerical ranks the number of persons who know anything of the data for their assertions as to matters of fact is wonderfully small. People will defend the " canon " most bitterly, without any idea at all of the way in which the " canon " was formed, or the evidence on which it rests, or the cause of the difference between the canons accepted in Rome and Geneva. Sentences which are mere matters of fact, when employed in newspapers actually shock the minds of very excellent and "well-informed people" as if they were impious. Tell a party of well-educated Evangelical ladies that St. Paul quoted comic plays in his epistles, speaking in fact from Menander instead of his own thought, and they will, till re-assured by some clergyman, simply disbelieve the assertion. One-half of the calcula- tions of Dr. Coleruso are very unimportant statements of fact, based en the actual text of the Pentateuch ; yet so new were they to people who had been reading the Pentateuch all their lives that they struck them as impious. The religious newspapers write very strongly for and against Arianism, Erastianiam, and neology, and their readers think they are thereby greatly informed. Yet there is perhaps scarcely one in three who would not be very grateful if he or she were told clearly what each of the "isms" meant. Ask decent people who really care about theology what the word " Pantheism" signifies, and perhaps one in fifty will answer clearly ; yet every reviewer and religious editor uses the word as if his readers must know all about it, and explanation were waste of time.
The truth is, we believe, that with individual exceptions the mass of mankind,—and the " educated " are only a drilled section of the mass,—either will not or cannot burden their memories beyond a certain point, and have an instinctive dislike for
the labour involved in obtaining accurate but unneces- sary knowledge. If a subject from any cause interests their imagination, or is important to their business, or very deeply gratifies their vanity—a vety common impulse—they will retain all they read about it, or hear about it, and "get up" data with very commendable thoroughness. War, for example, interests most people, and while it rages newspaper readers develop topographical knowledge of a most unusual and minute kind ; but with the impulse the wish and In a great degree the power to exert the memory ceases. Whatever is essential to them they retain, as lawyers will retain a recollection of hundreds of precedents, but beyond that they are content if they can only know just so much as shall enable them to acquire more very rapidly whenever the need arises. If Spain seizes the Chincha Islands they will find out where the Chincha Islands are, but till then they will forget their existence comfortably. We do not know that, provided the memory is wisely applied, this limitation of the strain upon it is at all injudicious, and at all events it cannot be helped. The mind, teach it how you will, can forget how to make Greek iambics, and the mass of men once released from com- pression will use the pleasant power whether we like it or no. Only, life would be pleasanter to that mass if able editors would remember that this is the popular habit, and teach directly as well as by far- fetched and obscure allusion. "The man is a Hildebrand" tells them a good deal, but how much does it tell to the stockbroker aged forty-five?
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