TRADITION IN EDUCATION 187 



secondary claim be on the score of usefulness, the sooner this 

 subject is deleted from the time-table the better. In studying 

 classics the boy is all too frequently the passive recipient of 

 instruction in which he cannot possibly take a real interest 

 during the early stages and the utility of the study is in no 

 way obvious to him. If there be any foundation at all for 

 the oft-quoted educational principle that no new subject or 

 branch of study should be commenced until the learner realises 

 vividly that it is of importance ; if it be in any way true that 

 the individual recapitulates in a more or less contracted and 

 modified form in his own development the history of the 

 development of the race ; if the proper function of memory be to 

 inspire the imagination, not to confine it in the armour of hard- 

 and-fast rules : there can be no comparison whatever between 

 the claims of the traditional methods of classical education and 

 the modern methods of scientific and Manual Training; the old 

 ideals of mere study and brain work are obsolescent. 



With the closing paragraphs of Dr. Gow's paper on the 

 desirability of a due combination of beauty with utility, on the 

 necessity of cultivating artistic taste, on the advantage of being 

 able to discern " not only what is mathematically possible but 

 also what is artistically impossible," every engineer, every 

 thoughtful man, will be in accord. But surely a love of beauty, 

 a sense of form and appreciation of the fitness of things on the 

 one hand and ignorance of Latin on the other are not mutually 

 exclusive ! The critical faculty, pleasure in beauty, delight in 

 reading, sympathy and liberality of thought are emphatically 

 not the concomitants of a classical education alone — as Dr. 

 Gow, by suggestion, would have it — they are far from being 

 its inevitable consequences — as most headmasters would seem 

 to believe — but are derived from every part of a man's training 

 and are compatible with the most profound ignorance of classical 

 learning. And how is it possible to reconcile the Doctor's views 

 as to the desirability of a classical education for engineers, in 

 order to give them culture, taste, artistic feelings, habits of good 

 reading and the like, with his expressed opinion that " the boy 

 who is going to be a first-rate engineer will not take any more 

 literary education after the age of sixteen or thereabouts. Until 

 that age clever boys are almost always equally clever at every 

 subject but at sixteen their tastes begin to be pronounced and 

 their minds cease to be receptive except in one particular 



