That is the
way to teach, and the result was that in an incredibly short time Jones
could draw. The taking the work is a _sine qua non_. If I had not been
going to have his work, Jones, in spite of all his quickness, would
probably have been rather slower in learning to draw. Being paid in
money is nothing like so good.
This is the system of apprenticeship _versus_ the academic system. 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.
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