TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 861 



provided for, and even enforced upon, all, advanced instruction is for the few. 

 It is the interest of the commonwealth at large that every boy and girl showing 

 capacities above the average should be caught and given the best opportunities 

 for developing those capacities. It is not its interest to scatter broadcast a huge 

 system of higher instruction for anyone who chooses to take advantage of it, 

 however unfit to receive it. Such a course is a waste of public resources. The 

 broadcast education is necessarily of an inferior character, as the expenditure 

 which public opinion will at present sanction is only sufficient to provide 

 education of a really high calibre for those whose ultimate attainments will 

 repay the nation for its outlay on their instruction. It is essential that these few 

 should not belong to one class or caste, but should be selected from the mass of 

 the people, and be really the intellectual elite of the rising generation. It must, 

 however, be confessed that the arrangements for selecting these choice scholars to 

 whom it is remunerative for the community to give advanced instruction are most 

 imperfect. No ' capacity-catchinsr machine ' has been invented which does not 

 perform its function most imperfectly : it lets go some it ought to keep, and it 

 keeps some it ought to let go. Competitive examination, besides spoiling more or 

 less the education of all the competitors, fails to pick out those capable of the 

 greatest development. It is the smartest, who are also sometimes the shallowest, 

 who succeed. ' Whoever thinks in an examination,' an eminent Cambridge tutor 

 tised to say, ' is lost.' Nor is position in class obtained by early progress in learning 

 an inl'allible guide. The dunce of the school sometimes becomes the profound 

 thinker of later life. Some of the most brilliant g^eniuses in art and science have 

 only developed in manhood. They would never in their boyhood have gained a 

 county scholarship in a competitive examination. 



In Primary Schools, while minor varieties are admissible, those, for instance, 

 between town and country, the public instruction provided is mainly of one type ; 

 but any useful scheme of higher education must embrace a great variety of 

 methods and courses of instruction. There are roughly at the outset two main 

 divisions of higher education — the one directed to the pursuit of knowledge for 

 its own sake, of which the practical result cannot yet be foreseen, wjiereby the 

 ' scholar ' and the votary of pure science is evolved ; the other directed to the 

 acquisition and application of special knowledge by which the crnftsman, the 

 designer, and the teacher are produced. The former of these is called Secondary, 

 the latter Technical, Education. Eoth have numerous subdivisions which trend 

 in special directions. 



The varieties of secondary education in the former of these main divisions 

 would have to be determined generally by considerations of age. There must be 

 different courses of study for those whose education is to terminate at sixteen, 

 at eighteen, and at twenty-two or twenty-three. AVithiu each of these divisions, 

 also, there would be at least two types of instruction, mainly according as the 

 student devcted himself chiefly to literature and language, or to mathematics and 

 science. But a general characteristic of all Secondary Scliools is that their express 

 aim is much more individual than that of the Primary School : it is to develop 

 the potential capacity of each individual scholar to the highest point, ratlier 

 than to give, as does the Elementary School, much the same modicum to all. For 

 these reasons it is essential to have small classes, a highly educated staff, and 

 methods of instruction very different from those of the Primary School. In the 

 formation of character the old Secondary Schools of Great Liritain have held their 

 own with any in the world. In the rapid development of new Secondary Schools 

 in our cities it is most desirable that this great tradition of British Public School 

 life should be introduced and maintained. It is not unscientific to conclude that 

 the special gift of colonising and administering dependencies, so characteristic of 

 the people of the United Kingdom, is the result of that system of self-government 

 to which every boy in our higher Public Schools is early initiated. But while 

 we boast of the excellence of our higher schools on the character-forming side of 

 their work, we must frankly admit that there is room for improvement on their 

 intellectual side. Classics and mathematics have engrossed too large a share of 

 attention ; science, as part of a general liberal education, has been but recently 



