CHAPTER XXXIII
WHAT GOOD WILL EDUCATION EFFECT?
This letter came to me: "Will more knowledge about marriage, and even careful education as to married life, make happy marriage possible? Mere ideas in the mind are not going suddenly to transform you or your partner into persons of perfection. In other words, how much can we avoid by knowledge and how much are we bound to learn by hard and often unlovely experience?"
Suppose one were going to cross the ocean on a ship which he was to steer. How useful would it be for him to know all about ships in general and his ship in particular? How useful would it be for him to know in theory how to steer a ship? How useful would it be for him to know about the shortest and best routes to the ports he might want to visit? How useful would it be for him to know about storms and other dangers he might encounter?
The fact is that knowledge about any course of life we want to pursue is of the greatest value.
It is just as important in the matter of marriage as in anything else. And we have to learn these things by instruction first. Later on we learn by experience.
Let us say that one wanted to take up a course in engineering of one kind or another. Would he try to learn by experience without taking instruction first? He would after a lifetime not know as much as he could learn by getting the experience represented in the schools.
Experience is indispensable, but we need first of all instruction. Instruction represents the experience of ten thousand others and it is just as necessary in marriage as elsewhere.
That is the trouble today about marriage. People are trying to learn by experience alone without any previous instruction, and in doing so they are just as apt to fail as a young man who tried to become a doctor or a lawyer without taking advantage of the stored-up knowledge of the race in books and schools. The fact is that society does not allow a young man to become a doctor or lawyer without training in the theory of medicine or law; but we allow anyone at all to marry without any instruction whatsoever.
Is it any wonder that divorces occur so frequently?
The writer of the letter from which I was quoting adds: "Are you not looking for Utopias when you expect ideal bliss from the beginning of marriage to the end?"
No, we are not looking for Utopias any more than we are looking for ideal doctors because of studies medical students pursue; but the chances of getting a good doctor are a thousandfold greater by giving one a training in a medical school.
The writer adds: "Are not life and experience and time the best and only teachers for most people?"
What I have already said answers that question. Life and experience and time are necessary to work out a successful marriage, but the preliminary knowledge I advocate would help here just as much as in other lines of human activities.