5 i2 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



one. Unfortunately what the boy really receives is not a 

 classical education at all, but a grammatical one— quite another 

 thing. Nothing is more educative than a knowledge of the 

 masterpieces of literature in all languages; but our youths do 

 not receive any such instruction. It is doubtful whether many 

 of them have ever even read through the Iliad so as to under- 

 stand the wonderful construction and the wisdom of the great 

 fable which it develops for the purpose of adding wisdom to 

 mankind. This is not taught, but the boy is kept writhing on 

 the gridiron of grammatical difficulties. Even with regard to 

 English literature, the masterpieces are not read to the boys in 

 an intelligent manner, but are merely used for philological 

 texts. The result is that few of our young people are even 

 acquainted with the masterpieces of literature, and are certainly 

 ignorant of their beauty and incapable of appreciating it. 

 Thus when they grow up their minds are content with the 

 most trifling fiction and the most puerile drama. Similarly, 

 even in the teaching of mathematics, our boys are kept trifling 

 in the porch — worrying over permutations and combinations, 

 or burrowing into the depths of conic sections, when they 

 should be taken to the top of a mountain and be given a wide 

 survey of the whole field. Thus they too are instructed only 

 in the groundwork, and remain for all their lives ignorant oi 

 the main meaning and scope of what was intended to have been 

 taught to them. When we add to such negative teaching in 

 classics and mathematices equally fnegative teaching in 

 the facts of nature discovered laboriously by many great 

 workers, the square root of the sum results in the modern 

 Briton — at least so far as his knowledge goes. We do not wish 

 to see any branch of knowledge removed from the curriculum. 

 All knowledge is valuable ; but we do not wish to see the 

 receptive years of youth wasted upon unimportant knowledge 

 when they might be used for the acquisition of important ones. 

 The real fallacy of the schoolmaster is his supposition that 

 education is valuable chiefly as an exercise and not as an 

 opportunity for laying in stores of information. If this were 

 the case, nothing should be more carefully taught in schools 

 than the game of chess, which is perhaps just as good an 

 exercise in many respects as are mathematics or classics. But the 

 time of youth is short, and the opportunities soon vanish ; and 

 the boy kept trifling in the porch is apt, when he becomes a 



