THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE IN OUR SCHOOLS 421 



" I grow every day more despondent about the education 

 we give at our so-called classical schools. . . . One sees arrive 

 here every year a lot of brisk, healthy boys, with fair intelli- 

 gence and quite disposed to work, and at the other end one 

 sees depart a corresponding set of young gentlemen who know 

 nothing and can do nothing and are profoundly cynical about 

 all intellectual things. And this is the result of the meal of 

 chaff we serve out to them week after week : we collect it, we 

 chop it up, we tie it up in packets, we spend hours adminis- 

 tering it in teaspoons, and this is the end. . . . 



" What produces the cynicism about work so common in 

 classical schools is that the work is of a kind which does not 

 seem to lead anywhere and classics are a painful necessity 

 which the boys intend to banish from their minds as soon as 

 they possibly can. 



" This is a melancholy jeremiad, I am well aware ; but it 

 is also a frame of mind which grows upon me ; and to come 

 back to my original proposition, it is the stupidity of virtuous 

 men which is responsible for the continuance of this arid, out- 

 of-joint system." 



The inimitable description of "A Speech Day" given in 

 Mr. A. C. Benson's At Large (p. 219) also occurred to me : 



" Then the Bishop went on to talk about educational things 

 and he said with much emphasis that, in spite of all that was 

 said about modern education, we most of us realised as we 

 grew older that all culture was really based upon the Greek 

 and Latin classics. We all stamped on the ground and cheered 

 at that, I as lustily as the rest, though I am quite sure that it is 

 not true. All that the Bishop really meant was that such culture 

 as he himself possessed had been based on the classics. Now 

 the Bishop is a robust, genial and sensible man, but he is 

 not a strictly cultured man. He is only sketchily varnished 

 with culture. He thinks that German literature is nebulous 

 and French literature immoral. I don't suppose he ever reads 

 an English book, except perhaps an ecclesiastical biography ; 

 he would say that he had no time to read a novel ; probably 

 he glances at The Christian Year on Sundays and peruses 

 a Waverley novel if he is kept in bed by a cold. Yet he 

 considers himself and would be generally considered a well- 

 educated man. I believe myself that the reason why we, as 

 a nation, love good literature so little is because we are starved 

 at an impressionable age on a diet of classics ; and to persist 

 in regarding the classics as a high-water mark of the human 

 intellect seems to me to argue a melancholy want of faith in 

 the progress of the race. However, for the moment we all 

 believed ourselves to be men of high culture, soundly based 

 on the corner-stone of Latin and Greek. . . . 



