EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 81 



necessity of earning" a living" in the modern world is 

 not paramount. 



The linguistic and historical group of studies are 

 a common part of all general education. It is not 

 these subjects in themselves but the spirit in which 

 they are taught that the cause lies for criticism. 

 Many people must have felt the humiliation abroad 

 of being conversed to in their own language by a 

 foreigner who has never set foot in this country. I 

 envy the lads in modern technical colleges who are 

 given a grip of the calculus, as a tool rather than a 

 philosophy, at the time when my own efforts were 

 being dissipated on the most useless and uninterest- 

 ing parts of mathematics. I often say that I could 

 not without a serious preparation pass the entrance 

 examination into any university in the kingdom. It 

 is idle to pretend that these are in any sense tests of 

 a decent general school education, as they should be. 

 It is supposed to be general, but is too often so highly 

 specialised that no one, whatever his education, could 

 pass it ten years after leaving school or college, with- 

 out specially studying for it. Once, in some spare 

 time, I entertained the idea of sitting the London 

 University Matriculation Examination until I found 

 that the English demanded was not what an ordinary 

 man would think was meant, but an obsolete form 

 of it, dating from the time of Chaucer and earlier, a 

 most excellent and repaying subject no doubt for 

 those who require it, but as far removed as Latin 

 and Greek are from being evidence of a general 

 education. 



If the school curriculum were entirely recast along 

 modern lines and subjected by unprejudiced experts to 

 a thorough investigation, as is being done in some of 

 the institutions for educational research in America, 

 in order to eliminate what is unnecessary and retro- 

 grade, the school period ought to suffice to give 



