TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 837 
and yet we agree that ‘no preliminary discipline should be pressed at the risk of 
keeping minds from getting at the main matter, a knowledge of themselves and 
the world.’ 
This also was written by Mr. Arnold thirty-six years ago, and thoughtful critics 
are still repeating, and with some reason, that the majority of boys who grow up 
in our public schools seem hardly to have received an adequate training for many 
of the higher duties of life. 
We hear much more than formerly about the public schools being the best 
training-place for good citizenship. Therefore, say the critics, it is reasonable 
to inquire how far their educational system, their ideals, their traditions, their 
fashions, and the pervading spirit of their life fit the mass of their pupils intel- 
lectually and otherwise for the duties of citizenship, and for grappling in the right 
spirit with the problems that will confront them. 
‘ Any careful observer,’ says one of these writers, himself a loyal public-school 
man, and intimately acquainted with school life, ‘any careful observer, who has 
studied the political moods and opinions of the middle classes in this country 
during the past few years, can hardly have failed to notice two obviously decisive 
influences : an ignorance of modern history and a want of imagination. For both 
of these defects the public schools must bear their full share of blame. 
‘It may be doubted whether any other nation teaches even its own history so 
little and so badly.’ 
The result is that ‘to the average public-school and university man the foreign 
intelligence in his daily paper is of less interest than the county cricket; and 
though events of far-reaching importance may be happening almost under his eyes 
he is in the dark as to their significance.’ 
‘ As regards the duties and aims of citizenship in all the various affairs of his 
own country, political, social, economic, he goes out from his school almost wholly 
uninstructed by the lessons of history, or by any study of the life and the 
needs of our own times. Again, as it is urged, the lack of imagination is hardly 
less dangerous to us than lack of instruction in the lessons of history and the social 
conditions and needs amongst which we have to live and work. No doubt the 
gift of imagination is a natural gift,—it cannot be created. But, given the thing 
in the germ, it can be stimulated and developed, or starved, stunted, or even 
crushed out. No system of education that neglects it is even safe. For, without 
it, principle becomes bigotry and zeal persecution. It is conscientiousness divorced 
from imagination that produces Robespierres. Now, it is precisely here that we 
should expect the public schools to be most helpful, for it is through literature 
that the faculty is most obviously cultivated, and they all profess to give some- 
thing of a literary training. But though the intention is excellent the performance 
is often terribly meagre.’ Whatever may be thought of such criticisms as these, 
which come from within our public-school life, it is, I imagine, generally agreed 
by those who know both our national needs and the work and influence of our 
public schools, that there is much room for improvement in regard to methods of 
teaching, the cultivation of intellectual interests and tastes, and the stimulating 
habits of thought in the majority of their pupils. In close connection with these 
considerations there are two questions of practical importance which deserve a 
prominent place in any study of our public-school education. 
The first of these is whether it is good for all boys alike to continue their life 
at school, especially at a boarding school, up to the age of eighteen or nineteen ; 
and the other is whether more encouragement and pains should not be given to 
developing the best type of day school, or, to put it somewhat differently, whether 
the barrack life of the boarding school has not, through fashionable drift and class 
prejudice, become too predominant a part of our English education at the expense 
of the home life with all its finer educational influences. 
As regards the first of these questions, it will be remembered that Dr. Arnold 
considered it a matter of vital importance to expedite the growth of a boy from the 
childish age to that of a man. 
In other words, the boy should not be left to grow through the years of 
critical change from fourteen to nineteen without special regard to his growth in 
