Psychology applied to education : a series of lectures on the theory & practice of education / by James Ward ; edited by G. Dawes Hicks.

  • James Ward
Date:
1926
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Psychology applied to education : a series of lectures on the theory & practice of education / by James Ward ; edited by G. Dawes Hicks. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    talent, some of you have even two,” and that is enough. Yet no two of us have the same talent: we may be pretty sure of that. The doctrine which the Schoolmen held concerning angels, that each one was sui generis, that no two were alike, is surely true of human kind. Granted, then, that you can only walk on terra firma and cannot mount over the heads of your fellows to cleave the upper air, still that is no reason for not striking out a path of your own, no reason for submitting for ever to leading strings and always following slavishly in the wake of a crowd. To do this is to bury your talent; and, for fear of risking anything, to lose everything, to be but like dumb driven cattle and not as heroes in the strife. A nation where many are, or have to be, content with such a role cannot be progressive. To make this clear, I must go back a step. It is the fashion to talk of the soaring flights or the marvellous inspiration of genius. Such imagery is, however, misleading, oftener false than true. It is altogether a mistake to imagine that ordinary men can only hack their way through a thicket of difficulties which for great men disappear as by a touch from a magician’s wand. As a rule, it is the man of five talents who is the hardest worker, and the men who doubt if they have one who are oftenest lazy, who are prone to lay the blame on Nature and, as Locke said, “to complain of want of parts when the fault lies in their want of improvement of them.” More real humility is what such men need: they cannot set the Thames on fire, and so they hide their candle under a bushel instead of bettering the world and themselves by making the most of its light. And the result of such ineffectiveness in the many who have one talent—whether that be their fault or their misfortune—is that the few who have more talents are often doomed to failure for lack of co-operation and support. A telling instance in point is furnished by Professor Dewar in a part of his Address from which I have already quoted. I will give it in brief. “ The consular report estimates the whole value of German chemical industries at not less than fifty million sterling per annum. ... The fundamental discoveries upon which this gigantic industry is built were made in this country and were practically developed to a certain extent by their authors. But in spite of the abundance and cheapness of the raw material—[namely, coal-tar]—and in spite of the evidence that it could be most remuneratively worked up, these men founded no school and had practically no successors. The colours they made were driven out of the field by newer and
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