830 REPORT—1904. 
These are some of the criticisms which, as men of science, you have to meet, 
and I may safely leave them to your tender mercies. 
For myself my attitude in the whole matter must of necessity be a humble 
one. For many years of my life I was a teacher, but entirely untrained, or 
rather self-taught, that is to say, relying for my instruction and guidance 
entirely on my own reading, observation, experience, and practice, 
I belong to the pre-scientific age of Englishmen engaged in education, I grew 
up to my profession anyhow, like so many others; and now for some years I 
have ceased even to teach, and so even as an untrained teacher I am out of date. 
It is due to this audience and to my subject that I should say thus much. It 
is my appeal for your kind indulgence. 
As regards the critics whose views I have endeavoured to express, I may say 
at once that I do not go with them, because I am profoundly convinced that our 
‘nglish education needs the influence of more light and more thought from every 
quarter, and especially from those who are familiar with scientific methods. 
‘Blessed are they that sow beside all waters,’ 
Moreover, I hail the application of scientific intelligence and scientific methods 
to this subject, because, looking back, I am profoundly conscious that I should 
have done my own educational work far less imperfectly if in my youth I had 
undergone any rational scientific illuminating preparation for it. 
In such a process I should have lost no personal gift or aptitude that I 
possessed, and I should have gained some early knowledge and confidence and 
power which would have saved me much discomfort and anxiety and some 
mistakes and failures, and would have saved my pupils some loss and possibly some 
distress. 
When I turn with these thoughts in my mind and look out over the field of 
Inelish life I see very strong and valid reasons why our education, its merits, 
its defects, its methods and results, should be seriously considered here, as also in 
very different assemblies elsewhere. 
Above all, the persistently traditional and unscientific spirit that still pervades 
so much of it from top to bottom, its lack of reasoned reflection, demands our 
special attention. 
‘The want of the idea of science, that is of systematic knowledge,’ said Matthew 
Arnold, ‘is, as I have said again and again, the capital want at this moment of 
Inglish education and English life. Our civil organisation (including our educa- 
tion) still remains what time and chance have made it.’ 
This was written about thirty-six years ago, and it is, to say the least, a sur- 
prising thing that in an age of unusually rapid scientific development it should be, 
in the main, still so true, as it undoubtedly is, of a great part of our English 
educational system, 
_ There is the lack of any systematic preparation for the business of teaching 
which still prevails throughout our middle and upper-class education, although 
here in Cambridge and in Oxford some excellent pioneer work is being done in the 
training of teachers. 
There is the general lack of interest in education which is still so noticeable in 
a great deal of English society of all grades, the spirit of indifference to it, and 
even the tendency to depreciate the intellectual life. 
There is the excessive influence of tradition and routine on our great schools 
and universities, and in some quarters an inert or suspicious conservatism. 
There is throughout our middle-class education a state bordering on chaos, a 
country largely unexplored, a mixture of things good and bad, involving a vast 
amount of wasted opportunity and undeveloped faculty. 
Even in elementary education, which has received the largest share of public 
attention, there is much that needs to be done in a more thoughtful and scientific 
spirit. 
; Party politics have to be eliminated as far as possible, especially ecclesiastical 
politics. 
