Teaching in a crowded school is "like the undertaking, related by Livy, of Accius Navius, the augur, to cut a whetstone with a razor ... the sharpness of human faculties, is so blunted and destroyed"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)


Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange; Printed by Richard Wilson
Date
1831
Metaphor
Teaching in a crowded school is "like the undertaking, related by Livy, of Accius Navius, the augur, to cut a whetstone with a razor ... the sharpness of human faculties, is so blunted and destroyed"
Metaphor in Context
What a contrast does this species of instruction exhibit, to the ordinary course of scholastic education! There, every lesson that is prescribed, is a source of indirect warfare between the instructor and the pupil, the one professing to aim at the advancement of him that is taught, in the career of knowledge, and the other contemplating the effect that is intended to be produced upon him with aversion, and longing to be engaged in any thing else, rather than in that which is pressed upon his foremost attention. In this sense a numerous school is, to a degree that can scarcely be adequately described, the slaughter-house of mind. It is like the undertaking, related by Livy, of Accius Navius, the augur, to cut a whetstone with a razor -- with this difference, that our modern schoolmasters are not [page 46] endowed with the gift of working miracles, and, when the experiment falls into their hands, the result of their efforts is a pitiful miscarriage. Knowledge is scarcely in any degree imparted. But, as they are inured to a dogged assiduity, and persist in their unavailing attempts, though the shell of science, so to speak, is scarcely in the smallest measure penetrated, yet that inestimable gift of the author of our being, the sharpness of human faculties, is so blunted and destroyed, that it can scarcely ever be usefully employed even for those purposes which it was originally best qualified to effect.
(pp. 45-6)
Provenance
Searching "mind" at Electronic Text Center at UVA Library
Citation
Godwin, William. Thoughts on Man. London: Richard Wilson, 1831. Online edition by Charles Keller and Christine Ruotolo, UVa Electronic Text Center, 1997. <Link to UVa's Electronic Text Center>
Date of Entry
08/11/2005

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.