October i, 19 14] 



NATURE 



129 



a letter. At the end of two hours he \V3S found 

 sitting, very pale, before a large sheet of paper, on 

 which he had written, ' I say Cox ' — ' Cox ' being the 

 name of the regimental banker." He did not know 

 even how to begin to write a letter. - 



We ask the schools for mental power as of old one 

 asked for bread, and they give us a stone. No doubt 

 public school form is a beautiful stone, a diamond; 

 but we want some bread as well, even if it were only 

 in the Falstaffian proportion of bread to sack. For 

 my part I do not see why the average boy at- school 

 should not have reasoning power and a love for read- 

 ing and knowledge as well as good manners, and this 

 is why I ask for a great reform in our schools. We 

 want from the school what nature has not been accus- 

 tomed to give, and what home life cannot give, the 

 development of the intellect, and the school fails to 

 give it in ninety-five out of every hundred cases. The 

 great danger in school life is that it may hurt indi- 

 viduality, originality, because a boy, however harum- 

 scarum, is naturally conventional and imitative. Good 

 form comes easily, therefore, and the master is more 

 than satisfied, he is proud. He often speaks of it as 

 character, but he is quite wrong. Character comes 

 from home life, not from school life, which indeed is 

 rather antagonistic to character. It comes from con- 

 tact with fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, 

 relations and friends. School life tends to induce a 

 contempt for the lower classes and a slavish admira- 

 tion of the upper classes, which is altogether wrong in 

 a democracy, and can only lead to evil. 



It always happens that the real education of the 

 average man begins when he falls in love and sees the 

 necessity for writing love letters. He must have spent 

 many years of worry at school and passed examina- 

 tions in Latin and mathematics, perhaps in French 

 or German, in geography, and many other subjects, 

 all taught in water-tight compartments- yet he is quite 

 illiterate. If he has been slightly higher than the 

 average boy he is able occasionally in after life to 

 quote one or two tags from the Latin grammar and 

 to say that he thought he remembered something of 

 the pons asinorum ; he is also fond of using the expres- 

 sion, "the unknown quantity .r," because it shows 

 that he once worked at algebra. A Premier of Great 

 Britain who had sent out a great military expedition 

 to Cape Breton expressed great delight afterwards 

 when he suddenly discovered that Cape Breton was an 

 island. Chancellors of the Exchequer have shown 

 themselves to be quite ignorant of the simplest arith- 

 metic. A very successful Cambridge coach told me 

 that it is quite common for the father of a pupil to 

 tell him that he does not wish his son to get a good 

 degree. Generalisation is always dangerous, But I 

 think I am safe in saying that Englishmen of the 

 higher classes do not believe in education. They 

 believe in what they call character, which always to 

 them means public school form, and they believe in 

 mental mediocrity, which in most cases means mental 

 inferiority. This gives one explanation of the persist- 

 ence of the public school system. The man who re- 

 members his years of dull school classroom routine 



2 The Report of the Commiss'on on the Education and Trainine of Officers 

 of the Army (iqo2> is well worth study. Dr Maguire, the most experienced 

 coach, said, as a witness : — " I atin, as taught to the average schoolboy is 

 pure waste of time, and does not develop intelligence or tend to breadth of 

 culture in the lea~t or facilitate the acqui'-itinn of modem languages." . . . 

 " The prominerce of ancient classics in English schools and the large 

 proportion of youthful years devoted to failure in regard to them explain the 

 stupidity and incaparity of tlieir pupils as compared with the sara' class of 

 persons in other a'^vanced communities." . . . " They [classics] are kept in 

 such_ vogue to suit the convenience of languid schoolmasters wHo can teach 

 nothing e'se, and for no other reason whatever." He spoke of " the absurd 

 anachronism of lazy and costly schools, which re-dered so many of us 

 ignorant of the very subjects which are generally useful and interesting." 

 He said : "b- t our educational system all round is utter folly at b»st." 

 Speaking of English-Universities, " the whole system is a grievous absurdity. ' 

 " ' Society ' and snobbery are the curses of England." 



with no intellectual result is not likely to be enthu- 

 siastic over the education of his son. 



Unfortunately all secondary schools try to copy the 

 public schools. They also aim at teaching good torni, 

 mainly by magnifying the importance of football and 

 cricket. To differentiate themselves from the primary- 

 schools, they compel every boy to learn through Latin. 

 And all this they do at a rate which suits the pocket- 

 of the lower middle-class parent. It is a poor imitation 

 of a system only one part of which is worthy oi 

 imitation. 



I can understand why Tom Sawyer and his friends, 

 when they started their gang of robbers, initiated them 

 through passwords and a ritual. That was for "side." 

 The gang did not consist of pirates or robbers ; they 

 were innocent young boys, and their passwords and 

 ritual were the essence of the romance of the thing. 

 Latin for the average youth seems to me to be merely 

 grown-up Tom Sawyerism, and is allied in obvious 

 ways to the worship of Mumbo-Jumbo. It used to be 

 that the use of fur on clothes was reserved for the 

 higher classes. At another time gentlemen only were 

 allowed to wear swords. In China and Japan certain 

 buttons and coloured dresses indicated certain rank. 

 In our own time there are fashions of slang which dis- 

 tinguish the smart set of society. The survival of 

 Latin and Greek is very much the same sort of thing. 

 It has no more to do with education than the two hind 

 buttons of our coats or the wigs of our judges have 

 to do with convenience. The classics ride us like 

 Sindbad's old man of the sea. All over the Briti^i 

 Empire a well-educated man cannot become a profes- 

 sional man of almost any kind unless he pretends to 

 know something of one or more dead languages, such 

 knowledge being of no essential value to him. It is 

 something like what the old Test Act imposed upon 

 us ; for 130 years a British citizen perfectly competent 

 to fill the highest posts could not take upon himself 

 the smallest kind of public work unless he could swear 

 to a certain formula. Most of the numerous students 

 of a very important school of mines refuse to take their 

 B.Sc. degrees because they are wise enough to refuse 

 to learn Latin. The mine-owners are wise enough to 

 engage these men if they possess only the college 

 diploma, although they have no degree. There is 

 scarcely one mining engineer holding a universit}- 

 degree in the country that I speak of. Indeed, I may 

 say that only a few mining engineers in Great Britain 

 hold a university degree, and this is for the same 

 reason. 



If there is any particularly useless, poor, genteel 

 clerk you will find that his son must be taught Latin. 

 If there is any little township in a new country where 

 everybody is ignorant, the schoolmaster must Jeach 

 Latin. Any cheap schoolmaster, knowing nothing, 

 worth nothing, will, you may be sure, say that he can 

 teach Latin. If there is a particularly illiterate bar- 

 room loafer in the town who never reads books or 

 newspapers you will find that he has a stock-in-trade 

 of perhaps three Latin phrases which keep him pro- 

 vided in beer. 



Do you know why Portia the Maid of Belmont re- 

 mained so long unmarried? It was because her 

 suitors assumed that the golden language of conquest 

 was Greek and the silver language was Latin. ^ If you 

 read between the lines you will see that this is what 

 Shakespeare meant. His leaden casket signified the 

 English of Belmont-cum-Stratford-on-Avon. 



The worst of it is that the average boy who has done 

 almost nothing else than Latin and Greek at school 

 gets absolutely no love for the classics ; he never reads 

 a Greek or Latin author after he leaves school. He 

 might enjoy them in translations, but he hates their 

 names, and even if he did not it would never enter his 



NO. 2344, VOL. 94] 



