470 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



It is thus incorrect to imagine that a reform of the school curriculum, whether 

 in the direction of a better teaching of science or classics, the abolition of Greek, 

 or the introduction of more science or more scientific studies, will have any large 

 influence in determining the character of the man produced by the system of 

 education. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to undervalue the influence 

 of the intellectual content of the education on the character and behaviour. 

 Everything here, however, depends on the emotional colour which is given to the 

 studies. All school studies can be biased or turned to the glory of God or of the 

 Fatherland, or be made to afford lessons- in the desirability of certain abstract 

 principles which may guide conduct, such as the ideas of freedom, sacrifice, 

 patriotism, or national vanity. A certain community of opinion on purely intel- 

 lectual questions is of value in promoting the solidarity of a nation. The value of 

 literature must not be underrated in bringing a boy in relation with his fellows, in 

 making him responsive to their changing thoughts, and in enabling him to enter 

 into their hopes and fears, their joys and sorrows. But according to our ideas this 

 side of education has a still more important part to play. A too rigid social rule 

 may result in producing a people so " moral " that all change becomes "immoral" 

 and social progress practically ceases ; such a condition seems to have existed in 

 Japan during the 200 years under the Shoguns, 1 and must have occurred again 

 and again in the history of past empires and nations. 



It is to the intellectual side of the curriculum that we must look for the 

 implantation of suggestions and desires for initiation and invention, so that the 

 social rule may be regarded not as something hard and fast, carved in granite for 

 all time, but as comparable to a tree in full growth which is constantly putting 

 forth new branches and fruits. 



We may conclude, then, that, although we regard the building up of character 

 as the first aim in our school system, we may nevertheless give the educational 

 reformer a free hand in the modification of the school curriculum without 

 necessarily interfering with this its supreme purpose. 



Training in Human Experience 



A race, even though composed of individuals who are all "good," must go 

 down in the struggle for existence if it is unable to fight for its own hand and to 

 utilise its past experience and the foresight gained by this experience in procuring 

 from the natural resources of the world all those products which are necessary for 

 the maintenance of its members. This efficiency of the state can be attained only 

 if their education has succeeded in making the citizens useful as well as good. It 

 is this function of education which we in England have most neglected, and in 

 which the need for reform is the most pressing. Our failure to correlate education 

 to the needs of the nation, to make it useful in fact, rendered us unready for the 

 present war, and has prolonged the war at the expense of thousands of lives, and 

 leaves still in the balance our fate in the times that are to follow. 



The position of any species in the animal scale is determined by the range of 

 its powers of reaction and adaptation ; in the higher types it depends on the 

 ability of the animal to profit by experience, so that in all its acts it may eschew 

 the evil and choose the good. In man the young animal comes into the world 

 with a brain representing almost a clean slate, a plastic mass of nervous matter, 

 in which the paths are to be laid down and the behaviour determined by experi- 

 ence, i.e. by education. The helplessness of the human infant as compared with the 



Chamberlain tells us that the Japanese word used for an immoral action 

 meant literally "an other-than-to-be-expected action." 



