July 5, 1900] 



NATURE 



223 



all English boys ; it is quite impossible for us to make a 

 seventy-year-old Alexandrian philosopher of you, thank 

 God I time enough for you to do that for yourself when 

 you have finished your educational course. 



I say that this observational and experimental kind of 

 study is almost the only one in which it is possible for a 

 teacher to guide and instruct without doing harm— and 

 it is very important that a boy's studies should be 

 guided. Take the very clever boy who dislikes the 

 study imposed upon him, and who takes earnestly to 

 something else, his own choice, in which he has no 

 guidance. See how he becomes a " crank." A man 

 who might be of the salt of the earth if he could only 

 co-ordinate his opinions with those of other people, a 

 leader among men of thought ; he loves to differ from 

 .all other people, and wastes a valuable life in disputation. 



I know that many readers will find it difficult to con- 

 sider this question ; they will find it impossible to see 

 things from a new point of view. As a rule a man has 

 no i)oint of view of his own, he never thinks for himself 

 except about certain matters that only concern himself 

 Even a learned man thinks, not on the subject of his 

 learning, but about his special methods of cataloguing 

 his knowledge, and of course it is only from this that he 

 ■can get any mental enjoyment. The dullest boy thinks 

 a good deal, and even the average man, although think- 

 ing for himself has been repressed in him all his life. 

 We ought to call all such people pedants, because they 

 never really think about things of general interest to the 

 world. It is extraordinary how general is the impression 

 of everybody that he really does think for himself and 

 comprehends what he says. At the age of fourteen I 

 wrote an excellent little essay on Chaucer ; I recollect 

 now that my knowledge of Chaucer was confined to a 

 i&w of the well-known extracts. 



The opinions of educated young men change with the 

 moon, or rather with the period of publication of the 

 monthly magazines. A mathematical teacher uses the 

 same fallacious logic in some demonstration year after 

 year, and at length finds out his mistake from somebody 

 ■else. Learning seems to destroy all power to think. 

 From 500 A.I), to 1453 A.D. the scholars of Constantinople, 

 with all the learning of Greece and Rome, produced not 

 one original work. 



I think that for a very clever boy any subject of study 

 is good enough, although not so good as natural science. 

 But Sanscrit, Chinese, or any other language and 

 literature, or astrology or divinity, is just as good a 

 medium as Greek or Latin, if all the best men of his 

 own time happen to use the same medium, and if it 

 enables him to come into mental contact with great men. 

 But what of the other 98 per cent, of all boys— the 

 average boys .^ 



The men who frame schemes of education really frame 

 them for boys such as they themselves were. Anybody 

 who cannot follow such a scheme is said to be stupid, 

 and he is so often called stupid that he actually gets to 

 think himself stupid. In this nineteenth century we do 

 not wish, as in the time of Erasmus, to produce merely a 

 itw learned men. At all events, if parents pay largely 

 for education, we do not think it fair to send back 98 per 

 cent, of their sons with the contract unfulfilled on our 

 part. Think of 100 boys being sent to a bootmaker who 

 had only one kind of ready-made boot of one size. He 

 sends ninety-eight of the boys back with feet so hurt by 

 trying on that they can never wear anything but slippers 

 all their life after ; he keeps their money, and compels 

 the boy? and their parents to take all the discredit of the 

 transaction. Christ's curse is on the schoolmaster when 

 he calls a boy a blockhead. 



It is a very curious thing that when a boy has been 

 <alled a dunce a number of times he actually gets to 

 think himself a dunce, and in after life never blames 

 his schoolmaster ; he has only praise for the system 



NO. 1601, VOL. 62] 



of education. Men who have never been able to do 

 more than quote tags from the Latin grammar, or get 

 beyond the Asses' Bridge in Euclid, are usually quite 

 enthusiastic about the value of the orthodox education in 

 the training of the mind, and so we find engineers and 

 other illiterate persons advocating classical education. 

 A donkey might just as well brag of the enormous ad- 

 vantage it was to him in having once been kept about a 

 racing stable. But a much more curious thing is the 

 praise given by clever mathematical physicists to the 

 wretched system of teaching of Euclid which wasted their 

 youth. A well-known and exceedingly able and ingenious 

 scientific man praises the school teaching in physics and 

 chemistry which he had as a boy from a certain master 

 of his, and yet everybody who knew master and pupil 

 knows that the pupil became a scientific man in spite of, 

 and not through, the teaching of his master. Even if 

 such clever men were right as to suitability of a system 

 of training for themselves, they have no right to assume 

 that it is right for the other 99 per cent, of boys at school. 



Classical education gets all the credit that ought to 

 belong to the other kinds of education that usually ac- 

 company it. A boy is at a good public school at which 

 healthy, moral, manly training of all kinds is given to the 

 usual manly type of boy. All the best masters are 

 probably good in classics. The boy's own prizes are for 

 classics, because there are not often scholastic prizes for 

 anything else. Success in classics has been always put 

 before him as the highest kind of success. The boys 

 whom he worships are all good in classics. Of course, 

 classics gets the credit for everything, including those 

 things that are good in spite of the classics. Even good 

 manners and tact and amiability, and I might almost say 

 good batting and bowling and fielding, are thought to be 

 due to the classics. The defenders of classics are 

 numerous, and miss no chances. A scientific friend of 

 mine, before a royal commission, commended the study 

 of Greek, because the Greek alphabet is so much used in 

 mathematics. Surely for such a purpose Chinese is ever 

 so much more valuable, as there are many more letters. 

 Again, it is said that the study of classics helps one 

 greatly in the study of modern languages. These de- 

 fenders forget that Russians and Japanese are the best of 

 linguists, and yet they seldom learn any Latin or Greek. 

 It is strange also to find so many English boys, trained 

 for years in Latin and Greek, who seem to find insuper- 

 able difficulties in learning a modern language. In any 

 case, I am inclined to think that there is too much in- 

 clination to force boys to learn modern languages. Some 

 boys learn easily ; for them the study may be good. 

 Others learn with extreme difficulty. Had they not 

 better study something else ? 



Everybody is aware of the enormous difficulty of intro- 

 ducing a new invention, however valuable, if it involves 

 the "scrapping" of much existing machinery. Thus, 

 electric methods of working the District Railway have 

 not yet been introduced. The comfort of railway pas- 

 sengers everywhere is only slowly being attended to. 

 For this reason electric lighting proceeded slowly in 

 England and quickly in America. 



Now all the machinery of a school head master is 

 fitted for the teaching of Latin and Greek. Every master 

 is able to teach Latin well to clever boys, and everything 

 good for mental training for clever boys in such teaching 

 is well known to him. These men with capital so invested 

 look with alarm on every new footing gained by science 

 in schools, and with a wisdom gained by experience they 

 introduce what they call science teaching, adopting 

 methods which are such as can only disgust boys and 

 their parents with the new study, and then they point to 

 their want of success as a proof that the study of science 

 affords no good education. 



The prospect is very dismal ; for the capitalists whom 

 we fight against, whose interests we directly attack, are 



