PAPERS PRESENTED AT GENERAL SESSIONS 61 



ment their creditable execution reveals. The ability to do 

 this must not be regarded, as has been remarked, as a 

 mere virtuosity but as the symbol of an active and well 

 trained mind. They ask, and justly, if the mind is not to 

 be trained beforehand to reason and think how it can be 

 expected to do so at all efficiently once it finds itself con- 

 fronted by the actual problems and perplexities of life. 

 Then the problems are real and success or failure may be 

 the price of incorrect or faulty solutions. 



On the other hand, the artificial difficulties set up for 

 solution in school can bring no loss by occasional failure. 

 They, moreover, give the pupil that healthy exercise in 

 doing hard things, in untwisting knotty problems, and 

 overcoming real difficulties which is of such incalculable 

 value. We have the tendency to make everything too 

 easy, perhaps a bit too sugar-coated, with the result that 

 individuals trained under our system seldom gain, even 

 in after life, the intellectual independence and self-reli- 

 ance, the seeds of which should have been planted in 

 school days. 



Just after the war I saw a letter written by a promi- 

 nent officer in the English navy on receiving news of the 

 death of his old Greek master back at school. He was 

 commenting on the various things which he had studied 

 while in school and of their relative value in his after 

 life. It seems that he had been put in charge of one of a 

 fleet of nine destroyers and commissioned with the loca- 

 tion and destruction of German mines in the British 

 Channel and the Xorth Sea. It was soon discovered that, 

 in order to facilitate the laying of the mines and the mark- 

 ing of their positions, the Germans had taken to laying 

 them in more or less well defined patterns, some rather 

 simple and the rest very complicated. When a newly laid 

 mine field was discovered, either by accident or as the re- 

 sult of search, a dredging process was resorted to until 

 half a dozen mines had been located accurately. The 

 problem of the commander was to take the positions of 

 those which had been located, decide on what pattern the 

 field had been laid and predict where the other mines 

 were to be expected. In case correct conclusions were ar- 

 rived at. a mine field of several dozen mines might easily 



