TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 615 
and from taught; freedom is hampered by the need of considering the require- 
ments of external examinations; finally, the Universities have done but little 
to help and though the schools have more or less unwillingly recognised that 
there is some value in scientific studies, in consequence of the persistent demands 
men such as Huxley have made, more especially because it is seen that there 
is money in them, none the less there is still no real demand for them on the 
part of the public. Of this and, in fact, of nearly all the real problems of 
education the public are too ignorant to be judges. 
Having been more than forty years not only a teacher but also a student 
of students and of teachers, of educational methods and of the conditions under 
which teaching is carried on, I have been led to form very definite opinions, 
the more so as I have been able to regard the problems not only from the 
pedagogic side but also from that of the chemist and biologist—with some 
knowledge of the mechanism. 
My view—and it is one that I desire to press to a logical conclusion—is that 
we must recognise that human ability is not merely a limited quantity but that 
it varies enormously not only in quantity but also in quality: the human 
orchestra contains a great variety of instruments differing in tone and range, 
but Nature, like man, makes few instruments of superlative excellence, a vast 
number of very poor quality and only a moderate proportion of serviceable 
type. If Science can tell us anything, it is that the democratic and republican 
ideal of equality is the veriest moonshine—a thing that never has been and 
never will be. And education can do very little to alter the state of affairs : 
it cannot change the instrument, at most it can develop its potentialities and 
it may easily, by careless handling, do damage to the working parts. To take 
a special case, of interest at the moment, no contention is less to be justified, 
I believe, than that which has been put forward frequently, of late years, on 
behalf of women—that their disabilities are in no small measure due to the 
fact that we have neglected their education: give them time to educate them- 
selves and they will be as men in all things. Years ago, at our Stockport 
Meeting, I ventured to express the difference by saying that woman is not 
merely female man but in many respects a different animal : the two sexes have 
necessarily been evolved to fulfil different purposes. Nothing is more instructive 
in the history of modern educational progress than the fact that women have 
asked merely for what men have: at the Universities they have attended the 
men’s courses; not one single course have they demanded on their own account. 
Higher teaching in relation to Domestic Science so-called has only been thought 
of very recently and mainly because men have urged its importance. Most 
serious and, I believe, irreparable injury is being done to women, in London 
especially, by forcing them to undertake the same studies and to pass the same 
University examinations as the men: and the damage is done to the race, not 
merely to individuals, as the effect of education, whether direct or indirect, is 
clearly to diminish the fertility of the intellectual. Some day, perhaps, when 
the present wave of selfishness has passed over us, a rational section of women 
will found a woman’s university where women can be taught in ways suitable 
to themselves without injury to themselves. In saying these things, of course 
I am laying myself open to the charge of narrowness—in deprecation I can 
only say, that what we are pleased to call education is, for the most part, so 
futile in substance and in its results that I shall not mind in the least if I am 
accused of decrying it : in my opinion, we should all be better without most of 
it, men and women alike. So far as so-called intellectual education is con- 
cerned, learning to read seems to me to be the one thing worth doing: at 
present it is the thing most neglected in schools. 
The commotion raised in pedagogic circles, during the last few months, by 
Madame Montessori is sufficient proof, if one were wanted, of the hopeless 
crudity of our educational practices. 
To develop a rational system, we need to take into account man’s past 
history and to apply evolutionary and biological conceptions. Education, as we 
know it and practise it, after all is a modern superstition—something altogether 
foreign to the nature of the majority of mankind: it is based on the false 
assumption that we can all be intellectual; whereas. most of us can only use 
