OXFORD AND GREEK 637 



tracted from learning the examples by heart. Teaching Greek 

 and Latin thus, no master needs to think, any more than do the 

 boys. It was lately given me as the reason why an apprentice- 

 master in a small school could be expected to combine his own 

 reading for a university degree with thirty-six hours a week of 

 class-work, that " of course care is taken to give him classes 

 which need no preparation out of school." Yet this master is 

 supposed to be learning how to teach. Shall it surprise us if 

 he fail to teach boys how to learn ? 



When the methods and conditions of Greek study can be 

 like this, what wonder is it that the parents of average boys 

 and even the parents of boys above the average level, in- 

 creasingly protest not only that their boys learn nothing in 

 the " Greek " hour but that in many Greek-teaching schools 

 the intellectual tone is lower, the concentration of interest and 

 energy upon games and trivialities more marked, their own 

 difficulty more grave, at the last, in finding anything that the 

 boy can still do, still less anything that he wants to do, to earn 

 a living. To paraphrase only slightly a sentence already 

 quoted, such " classical " education is conducted " by people 

 who mean nothing in particular for people who wish to do 

 nothing in particular and to feel superior while they do so " ; 

 whilst the classical-trained boy, " if like many boys he is quite 

 ignorant of English " life, in its historic and geographic setting, 

 comes to the conclusion that life in general " is devoid alike 

 of sense and of interest." As taught to him, the languages and 

 literatures with which his studies deal are indeed " dead lan- 

 guages " and " dead letters " ; but they are dead for him, only 

 because they have been killed in the attempt to teach them. 

 Yet this is what the people who "save Greek" persist in de- 

 scribing as an ideal " preparation for life." 



But we have to face the facts. From a large majority of 

 what an earlier generation called its " Grammar " Schools, Greek 

 of the traditional sort has been abolished, grammar and all ; and 

 abolished in my opinion rightly. Real Greek was no longer 

 being taught at all ; and the substitute which was being crammed 

 into the boys was not wanted. The masters who thought 

 they were teaching Greek were sowing the seeds of a heartfelt 

 hatred of the whole subject, of which we reap the harvest 

 now an hundred-fold. And Convocation loves to have it so ! 



We may easily agree with both sides when they demand a 



