Lord Avebury's Address 101 



Huxley and Spencer, and they have been urged by 

 one Royal Commission after another. 



No doubt, there has been some improvement, but 

 the recent blue-book on schools shows that science 

 and modern languages are still woefully neglected. 

 Mr. E. Lyttelton, whom all will admit to be a great 

 authority, sums up the present position as follows: 



"Before 14 years of age," he justly says, "special- 

 ization is most undesirable, but under present arrange- 

 ments it is absolutely unavoidable, the constraining 

 cause being the value set on classics for a classical 

 scholarship and on mathematics for a mathematical 

 scholarship, to the total exclusion of other subjects 

 admirably well fitted for young boys. True, these 

 subjects are asked for, and questions are set, but it 

 has long been found out that the answers are either 

 not marked at all, or so low, that it still pays to drop 

 them altogether for the last eighteen months of the 

 boy's preparatory school career. This means that a 

 boy barely twelve years old will discontinue all but a 

 modicum of mathematics and other subjects, and be 

 pressed on in Latin verses and Greek sentences, and 

 the construing of difficult classical authors, till by 

 the time he is 13^ he is able to reproduce remark- 

 ably skilful bits of translation, but is contentedly 

 ignorant of English and other history, and has no 

 knowledge whatever of the shape, and size, and 

 quality of the countries of the habitable globe, and 

 perhaps more injurious still, does not know whether 

 the Reform Bill came before Magna Charta or the 

 sense of either." 



University authorities seem to consider that the 

 elements of science are in themselves useless. This 



