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the upper classes, which is altogether wrong in a democracy, and can only lead 
to evil. 
It always happens that the real education of the average man begins when he 
falls in love and sees the necessity for writing love letters. He must have spent 
many years of worry at school and passed examinations in Latin and mathematics, 
perhaps in French or German, in geography, and many other subjects, all taught 
in water-tight compartments, yet he is quite illiterate. If he has been slightly 
higher than the average boy he is able occasionally in after life to quote one or two 
tags from the Latin grammar and to say that he thought he remembered some- 
thing of the pons asinorum; he is also fond of using the expression ‘the unknown 
quantity 2,’ because it shows that he once worked at algebra. A Premier of Great 
Britain who had sent out a great military expedition to Cape Breton expressed 
great delight afterwards when he suddenly discovered that Cape Breton was an 
island. Chancellors of the Exchequer have shown themselves to be quite ignorant 
of the simplest arithmetic. A very successful Cambridge coach told me that 
it is quite common for the father of a pupil to tell him that he does not wish his 
son to get a good degree. Generalisation is always dangerous, but I think I am 
safe in saying that Englishmen of the higher classes do not believe in education. 
They believe in what they call character, which always to them means public 
school form, and they believe in mental mediocrity, which in most cases means 
mental inferiority. This gives one explanation of the persistence of the public 
school system. The man who remembers his years of dull school classroom 
routine with no intellectual result is not likely to be enthusiastic over the 
education of his son. 
Unfortunately all secondary schools try to copy the public schools. They 
also aim at teaching good form, mainly by magnifying the importance of football 
and cricket. To differentiate themselves from the primary schools, they compel 
every boy to learn through Latin. And all this they do at a rate which suits 
the pockets of the lower middle-class parent. It is a poor imitation of a system 
only one part of which is worthy of imitation. 
I can understand why Tom Sawyer and his friends, when they started their 
gang of robbers, initiated them through passwords and a ritual. That was for 
‘side.’ The gang did not consist of pirates or robbers; they were innocent 
young boys, and their passwords and ritual were the essence of the romance of 
the thing. Latin for the average youth seems to me to be merely grown-up Tom 
Sawyerism, and is allied in obvious ways to the worship of Mumbo-Jumbo. It 
used to be that the use of fur on clothes was reserved for the higher classes. At 
another time gentlemen only were allowed to wear swords. In China and Japan 
certain buttons and coloured dresses indicated certain rank. In our own time 
there are fashions of slang which distinguish the smart set of society. The 
survival of Latin and Greek is very much the same sort of thing. It has no 
more to do with education than the two hind buttons of our coats or the wigs of 
our judges have to do with convenience. The classics ride us like Sindbad’s old 
man of the sea. All over the British Empire a well-educated man cannot become 
a professional man of almost any kind unless he pretends to know something of 
one or more dead languages, such knowledge being of no essential value to him. 
It is something like what the old Test Act imposed upon us; for 130 years a 
British citizen perfectly competent to fill the highest posts could not take upon 
himself the smallest kind of public work unless he could swear to a certain 
formula. Most of the numerous students of a very important School of Mines 
refuse to take their B.Sc. degrees because they are wise enough to refuse to learn 
Latin. The mine-owners are wise enough to engage these men if they possess 
only the college diploma, although they have no degree. There is hardly one 
mining engineer holding a University degree in the country that I speak of. 
Indeed, I may say that only a few mining engineers in Great Britain hold a 
University degree, and this is for the same reason. 
If there is any particularly useless, poor, genteel clerk you will find that his 
son must be taught Latin. If there is any little township in a new country 
where everybody is ignorant, the schoolmaster must teach Latin. Any cheap 
schoolmaster, knowing nothing, worth nothing, will, you may be sure, say 
that he can teach Latin. If there is a particularly illiterate bar-room loafer in 
the town who never reads books or newspapers you will find that he has a stock- 
in-trade of perhaps three Latin phrases which keep him provided in beer. 
