Harold Edward Gorst

Born in 1868, Harold Edward Gorst was a British writer who worked as a journalist and playwright as well as an author of social commentary. He is associated with The Curse of Education, a book that questions standard ideas about schooling and argues that education can become limiting when it is too rigid or disconnected from real life.

Some surviving reference material about Gorst is quite sparse, but contemporary and later catalog records identify him as living from 1868 to 1950. He was married to the novelist Nina Gorst, who was herself a notable literary figure in Edwardian London.

Although he is not widely remembered today, Gorst's writing still attracts readers interested in the history of education, social criticism, and reform-minded debates from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work offers a glimpse of a period when many writers were rethinking how modern society should teach, train, and shape its citizens.