CHAPTER XVIII
THE PRINCIPLES OF THOROUGHNESS IN TEACHING AND IN LEARNING
1. It is a common complaint that there are few who leave school with a thorough education, and that most men retain nothing but a veneer, a mere shadow of true knowledge. This complaint is corroborated by facts.
2. The cause of this phenomenon appears on investigation to be twofold: either that the schools occupy themselves with insignificant and unimportant studies, to the neglect of those that are more weighty, or that the pupils forget what they have learned, since most of it merely goes through their heads and does not stick fast there. This last fault is so common that there are few who do not lament it. For if everything that we have ever read, heard, and mentally appreciated were always ready to hand in our memories, how learned we should appear! We do, it is true, make practical use of much that we have learned, but the amount that we recollect is unsatisfactory, and the fact remains that we are continually trying to pour water into a sieve.
3. But can no cure be found for this? Certainly there can, if once more we go to the school of nature, and investigate the methods that she adopts to give endurance to the beings which she has created.
I maintain that a method can be found by means of which each person will be enabled to bring into his mental
