128 



NATURE 



[October i, 1914 



the case of professions involving applications of 

 physical science, useless obligatory subjects are in- 

 sisted upon, so that for these professions the university 

 is a harmful institution. Medical students have so 

 much hard work in various kinds of grammar subjects 

 required for matriculation that they must be forgiven 

 for their utter ignorance of natural science. But an 

 outside Philistine may also be forgiven when he sug- 

 gests that the whole country might benefit if the 

 school training of medical students put them more in 

 sympathy with scientific discovery. It is a well-known 

 fact that there are medical men in lucrative practice, 

 said to have the highest university qualifications, who 

 tell you frankly that they do not believe in bac- 

 teriology I 



A great many young men from the secondary schools 

 are now entering the engineering profession. By 

 engineering I mean any kind of applied physical science. 

 Every important town in Great Britain has established 

 at least one great technical college at large cost in 

 building and apparatus, with staffs of professors and 

 teachers (always badly paid), and it is found that for 

 their first two years the students have to be kept at 

 great cost to the country learning those simple prin- 

 ciples of science which they ought to have learnt at 

 school. It is found that they are not only ignorant, 

 but they have none of the habits of thought and scien- 

 tific method which school laboratory work induces. 

 The clever ones, if they leave school at seventeen, 

 recover from the effects of a school education which 

 prepared men only for being lawyers or clergymen ; 

 but the average man finds that he has been prepared 

 only to be c hewer of wood and a drawer of water 

 to the real engineer. It is found in most cases that 

 the successful students are those who have attended 

 primary schools where no boy is compelled to learn 

 any language other than English, and where every 

 boy does laboratory work in mathematics and natural 

 science. There can be no doubt that poor boys have 

 now an enormous advantage over the sons of rich 

 men, for even when the fees of the day classes ar^ 

 large the evening class fees are small, and the poor 

 boys attending the latter are getting to be very fit 

 for higher study in natural science. 



The English school system has outlived the medieval 

 conditions which produced it. In old days the only 

 way to knowledge was through Latin : all writing 

 was in Latin. The result then was pretty much what 

 it is now; lawyers, clergymen, and schoolmasters had 

 to know some Latin after school life ; the average man 

 forgot anything he had learnt. A few very clever men 

 did read, but the average monk or priest was a very 

 ignorant person. 



English people know the worthlessness of the public 

 school system in the mental training of the average 

 bov. Why, then, do they submit to it? However 

 conservative they may be, they would not submit to 

 this worthless system merely because it is hallowed 

 by a history of five hundred years. 



The fact is, this worthless system continues because 

 in some occult way it seems to have a connection with 

 something of real importance, public school form. 

 There is really no connection. When, in mv youth, I 

 was a master at one of the great Engflish public 

 schools, like everybody else, I was a frightful prig in 

 regard to public school form. Eton form or Harrow 

 form or Rugby form or Clifton form was the thing 

 at each of these schools which was thought to be of 

 more value than anything else in the world. Dr. 

 Arnold, of Rugby, taught the trick of manufacturing 

 it. It is in itself a splendid thing. The public school 

 boy is trained in self-possession, modesty, cleanliness, 

 truthfulness, and courage. At school his health in 

 body and morals is all-important. He learns to lead 

 and also to obey. But the average resulting man 



NO. 2344, VOL. 94] 



is exceedingly ignorant ; he neither reads nor writes, 

 and he has little reasoning power except what his 

 sports have developed. This form is essentially aristo- 

 cratic. It is based on superiority of position or birth 

 [ or caste. A man's place is fixed, his attitude to people 

 of higher or lower rank is fixed. He needs no self- 

 assertion, and he cannot become a " bounder," that is, 

 a "cad"; but in Thackeray's sense he is usually a 

 " snob," and in various directions he may be a prig. 

 By prig, I mean a man who cannot get outside con- 

 vention and so cannot exercise his own common sense. 

 One defect is that public school form when combined 

 with poverty cannot make much money by its own 

 ability, and if it does not starve it must join the valets 

 or the grooms. Its strength lies in convention and 

 habit and the belief that poor people are not men but 

 a lower kind of animal who may be pitied as we pity 

 a suffering dog. Such pity can never raise the people 

 or reform abuses. In the Middle Ages young gentle- 

 men of England had the same sort of education. It 

 was probably best in Plantagenet times, when indeed 

 a well-trained young gentleman was not only very 

 healthy and courageous, but he had not much chance 

 of becoming lazy. A man was proud of his heavy 

 armour, and he was trained to act vigorously when 

 carrying it. They were chivalrous to each other, but, 

 alas ! to people outside their own class they were 

 cruel. The Black Prince is typical ; think of his 

 courtesy to King John of France, and then think of 

 his destruction of the persons and property of all the 

 peasantry in those large regions of France which he 

 covered with his marauding soldiers. This kind of 

 chivalry, which is never exhibited to a lower class than 

 one's own, has its beauty, but it does not suit a demo- 

 cracy ; it requires that there should be a lower class 

 than its own. The Spartans needed their helots. The 

 Southern planter in America had fine manners, but 

 he could not have cultivated them if there had been no 

 slaves and mean whites. It is a well-known fact that 

 some years before the Civil War in America it was 

 seriously proposed by prominent Southerners to make 

 slaves of the "mean," that is, the poor whites. The 

 chivalrous Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun showed but 

 little knowledge of his countrymen when he formed 

 his plan for reducing a large part of the working 

 classes of Scotland to slavery. Public school form may 

 sit not unhandsomely upon country gentlemen or any 

 rich men who have many servants or tenants or other 

 dependants, but it does not sit at all well upon poorer 

 men, for it puts them out of sympathy with people 

 among whom they must work. It is heartbreaking 

 when associated with the povertv of a man looking 

 for work in places where he has no influential friends, 

 as it is nearly always associated with illiteracy and 

 want of wisdom, with helplessness and with disinclina- 

 tion to learn. Nobody doubts that a modern country 

 gentleman is much more polished than Squire Western 

 or Squire Lumpkin, but he has much the same 

 opinions and forms them in the same way. The 

 manners of a young officer are certainly superior to 

 those of Ensign Northerton, but he is in much the 

 same state of ignorance. Nineteen out of any twenty 

 voung officers, if sent to the top of a hill to observe 

 things, cannot write an account of what they see, and 

 they can hardlv describe in spoken words what they 

 see, because their vocabulary is too limited. They 

 cannot write a simple letter in English, although they 

 are supposed to have learnt English in the best way, 

 through Latin. On the day when I wrote the last 

 sentence I happened to see the followinp^ statement in 

 the Times. It is from an unimpeachable authority, a 

 man whose business it is to teach young officers how- 

 to fill up official forms. He was speaking of their 

 ignorance and describing a special instance : " . . . a 

 young officer who shut himself up in a room to write 



