536 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



mar. The subject has been made arid and infertile. Give more 

 generous treatment a fair chance ! Limit, says one class of apologists, 

 the work in Greek to Homer and Herodotus. Let the boys do their 

 translations with open dictionary and grammar. Do not delay so 

 long over the introduction ; hasten their acquaintance with the Hellenic 

 heroes; let them come beneath their spell and experience their glamor. 

 With equal vehemence another school contends, not for Homer and 

 Herodotus, but for Plato's ' Eepublic ' and the ' Memorabilia ' ; not for 

 heroics, but for philosophy and art. The teaching of Greek is to have 

 a new lease of life if it gives pledges that it will turn over a new leaf. 

 These protestations of its advocates are pure cant. They known that 

 neither legend, history, philosophy, nor art has influenced the vast 

 majority of the boys who have thriven on a grammar-school training. 

 Stultify the grammar, distract attention from accidence, syntax, 

 prosody, and the value of the gymnastic is reduced to nil. Were it not 

 for its humorous side, this change of front would be somewhat tragic. 

 Boys are to be given the most sacred products of Greek thought as 

 playthings. They are to be encouraged to express their opinion, in 

 the vernacular of the dormitory, of Plato's metaphysics. 



Because in the past such good results have been obtained by giving 

 boys the shell without the kernel we are asked to believe that we shall 

 do far better by giving them the kernel without the shell. We decline 

 to recognize that it was not the nut which nourished them, but the ex- 

 ercise of cracking it which prepared their jaws for an attack on more 

 nutritious food. There is no question as to the nourishing properties 

 of the Greek kernel, but it must take its place with the English kernel 

 as an article of diet; and there are obvious reasons for serving the 

 English kernel first. 



Do away with grammar — sheer, barren, jejune grammar — and you 

 sacrifice the discipline which has caused our schools, for centuries after 

 the purposes of the classical revival were accomplished, to cherish 

 Greek and Latin as the most efficient instruments of education. We 

 do not want a reformed teaching of Greek. Its reformation would be 

 its destruction. Homer's clash of shields may stir a martial spirit. 

 Plato's spiritualism may satisfy a yearning. But these emotions are 

 not vehicles of education; they are its burdens. The valor, the phi- 

 losophy, the poetry, the art of the Greeks contributed little to the 

 making of the mind of the boy Johnson, the boy Macaulay, the boy 

 Gladstone — however much these great scholars may have been inspired 

 by Greek ideals in later life. We have Gladstone's own emphatic testi- 

 mony that when at Eton he cared nothing at all about the Homeric gods, 

 nor yet for many a year after he had left. He was at Eton under the 

 famous flogger, Dr. Keate, at a time when Greek and Latin were the 

 only subjects in the school curriculum, with " as much divinity as 

 can be gained from constructing the Greek Testament, and reading 



