Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: in EDUCATION ACCORDING TO RUSKIN I LAY down the last of the twenty-six volumes of Ruskin with a heart at once ill at ease and exultant. Ill at ease it is because of the sadnesses of his life, sadnesses born of himself and also of his dissatisfaction with his times; exultant because here is a man who tried, like Sir Henry Lawrence, to do his duty, to see straight and to think clearly, who despised cant and meanness, who in his unflagging courage spoke the thought that was in him and incarnated his own creed. His times were out of joint. He wanted to set them right and they did not care to be set right. He, in later years, spurned some important doctrines of his earlier. Rich for his wants, he made himself poor on his own land. An individualist in his theories of human development, an aristocrat and an autocrat, he was to a large extent in his use of his property a communist. A great interpreter of art, he became a great interpreter of life. Whether his theories of art, of political economy, of social science, of government,be true or false—and many are certainly false— he believed them to be true and greatly sacrificed for them. The interpretations which Ruskin gives of education are manifold, diverse, inconsistent, having their origin in a variety of causes and conditions. His remarks refer quite entirely to education as it belongs to England. Down to the passage of the Education Bill of 1870 there was no public education in England. Education was largely a matter either of private instruction or of church support and control. The renaissance in education which began in Prussia under William von Humboldt near the close of the Napoleonic wars still awaits its co-ordinate quickening among the English people. For the English people have never, until recent years, taken any p...