198 SIR WILLIAM RAMSAY 



Secondary education in Britain has always been chaotic, and 

 only of recent years have attempts been made to give it a sem- 

 blance of order. Teachers in secondary schools have, for the 

 most part, been untrained young men, whose only claim to enter 

 the profession of teaching has been a university degree. From 

 the grammar schools to the public schools the teaching has been 

 conducted largely by amateurs. Of course among them have 

 been some great schoolmasters, but though the result, on the 

 whole, has been to turn out a strong, healthy, moral youth, that 

 youth has been very ignorant of modern life and of scientific 

 thought. 



The older universities have accentuated these evils. Brought 

 up in the shrine of classical learning, more attention has been 

 devoted to form than to reality. Of recent years a change for 

 the better has been taking place, but nothing is more difficult 

 than to dispel the superstitions of centuries. The classical 

 languages and literatures are in reality relics of a past state of 

 civilisation. While they are, of course, valuable subjects of 

 study and afford a certain kind of training, they are utterly out 

 of touch with modern ideas. Few, very few, boys, perhaps 

 not one in a hundred, attain sufficient proficiency in them to 

 gain pleasure from them in later years ; and many, like the 

 writer, who spent his school and college days from the age of 7 

 to 16 largely in studying the classics, retain a few tags, a few 

 lines of verse, and the power to decipher a Latin inscription 

 with difficulty and to guess at the meaning of most of the words 

 in a Greek phrase. It may be said that the training was good ; 

 perhaps it was. But the aim of training, namely the power of 

 concentration, the exercise of judgment, and most of all the 

 development of the inventive faculties, could have been attained 

 infinitely better by substitution of almost any other subject for 

 the classics. 



We are reaping what we have sown. Our statesmen, with 

 very few exceptions, have not the remotest idea of science, and 



