We ourselves, as products of an educational system, are sufficiently perfect evidence against it. If we think of what we happily might have been, and then of what we are, we cannot but admit the total failure or the helpless insufficiency of our education.
Looking back on those years upon years which we spent in school, we know that something was wrong. If we will remember, we did not, at the time, exactly approve of the school system. Many of us, in fact, went in for sabotages. Our favorite brand of sabotage was the "withdrawal of efficiency" — in our case a kind of unconscious passive resistance. Good-natured onlookers, such as our parents or the board of education, might have thought that we were learning something all the while; but that's just where we fooled them! There were, of course, a few of us who really learned and remembered everything — who could state off-hand, right now, if anybody asked us, in what year Norman the Conqueror landed in England. But the trouble is that so few people ask us!
There was one bit of honesty in our schooling — at its very end. They called that ending a Commencement(毕业典礼). And so indeed we found it. Confused, unprepared, out of touch with the realities, we commenced(开始) then and there to learn what life is like. We found it discouraging in a thousand ways; but the thing which struck us at the time most forcibly was that it was in every respect quite unlike school. One could not cram for a job as if it were an examination; one could not get in the good graces of a machine as if it were a teacher; the docility(温顺) which won high "marks" in school was called lack of originality in the business world, dullness in social life, stupidity in the realm of love. We had been quite carefully prepared to go on studying and attending classes and taking examinations; but the real world was not like that. So, what difference does schooling make, to us or to the world? And what to us now are those victories and humiliations, the failure or success of school?
