METHODS OF SCHOLASTIC TEACHING 319 



>ublic school-boy is as good as anything the world has 

 seen. Habits of truth and honour, self-reliance, enterprise, 

 resolution, and high courage the boy tends to acquire from 

 his companions and retain in after life. He has good and 

 frank manners also, and some degree of refinement, but for 

 them his home surroundings and companions are responsible. 

 Such things cannot be acquired from books. His race cannot 

 be innately stupid, for it has been very successful and progres- 

 sive and has produced more really great men than perhaps 

 any other in the modern world. Moreover, many of the best 

 of the lower classes have risen into and intermarried with 

 the higher. The school-master, therefore, has magnificent 

 material to work on. 1 He is not hampered by limitations of 

 time and expense. If his system of education be good he 

 ought to produce a type of supreme intellectual vigour and 

 excellence. Notoriously he fails. 2 It is admitted on all 

 hands that young Englishmen of the better classes are, as a 

 rule, averse to, if not incapable of mental toil and enterprise. 

 Arrived in a world where men, strong because possessed of 

 applicable knowledge and effective because enamoured of 

 thought and labour, are making history as it has not been 

 made for two thousand years, the public school-boy or uni- 

 versity student finds nothing in his past that links him with 

 the stirring life around. His long labour with words has 

 been too uncongenial and uninteresting to endow him with a 

 love of classical or indeed any literature except of the lightest 

 kind. His reflective powers have been so little developed 

 that he turns with loathing from deeper books, no matter how 

 valuable intellectually or materially. The writers of such 

 books cannot even earn a living wage in England. Neces- 

 sarily he declines on sport, the one interest to which he is 

 linked by his past. The boys in the play-ground have taught 

 him very well, the school-master has trained him very ill. If 

 ever he acts a part worthy his nation as worker or thinker it is 

 under conditions that bring the characteristics, especially the 

 courage, resolution, and self-reliance, developed in the piay- 



1 The same material that naval officers are made of probably the 

 most effective men as a class in the nation. 



2 I fear all this will appear very dogmatic and even profane to the 

 advocate of " classical " education. We have any number of assertions 

 that classics confer all sorts of benefits on the individual gentleness, 

 " true " refinement, intelligence, and so forth. But definite proof is lack- 

 ing. During the course of history every nation and every class that has 

 adopted a scientific education has been progressive and intelligent, and 

 has produced many great men and a fine literature. Is there any 

 evidence that a " classical " training is as invariably associated with these 

 characteristics 1 There is no other criterion. 



