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
is no more mystery about painting than about conveyancing--not half
in fact, I should think, so much. One may ask, How can the
beginner paint, or draw conveyances, till he has learnt how to do
so? The answer is, How can he learn, without at any rate trying to
do? If he likes his subject, he will try: if he tries, he will
soon succeed in doing something which shall open a door. It does
not matter what a man does; so long as he does it with the
attention which affection engenders, he will come to see his way to
something else.
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