L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 267 
permits, how much of it is derived from the common European tradi- 
tion and how much it owes to the influences of other national cultures ; 
but it should, in its concrete individuality, be the basis of his education. 
Lastly, I have urged that among the strains or currents in a national 
tradition the highest value belongs to those that are richest in the 
creative element. These are themselves traditions of activity, practical, 
intellectual, sesthetic, moral, with a high degree of individuality and 
continuity, and they mark out the main lines in the development of 
the human spirit. Consider what man has made of poetry and what 
poetry has made of him; what a noble world he has created out of the 
sounds of vibrating reeds, strings, and brass; think of the expansion of 
soul he has gained through architecture and the arts of which it is the 
mother and queen; of the achievements of his thought, disciplined into 
the methods of mathematics, the sciences and philosophy. Do we not 
rightly measure the quality of a civilisation by its activities in such 
directions as these? And if so, must not such activities be typically 
represented in every education which offers the means to anything that 
can properly be called fullness of life ? 
If the force of the argument be admitted, the principles of the curri- 
culum, about which so much has been written, take a clear and simple 
shape. A school is a place where a child, with his endowment of sensi- 
bilities and powers, comes to be moulded by the traditions that have 
played the chief part in the evolution of the human spirit and have the 
greatest significance in the life of to-day. Here is the touchstone by 
which the claims of a subject for a place in the time-table can be infallibly 
tested. Does it represent one of the great movements of the human 
spirit, one of the major forms into which the creative impulses of man 
have been shaped and disciplined? If it does, then its admission cannot 
be contested. If it does not, it must be set aside; it may usefully be 
included in some special course of technical instruction, but is not 
qualified to be an element in the education of the people. 
The same criterion may be applied to the methods by which the 
subjects of the curriculum are taught. We are constantly told that the 
‘ educational value ’ of a subject lies in the mental discipline it affords, 
and, from this point of view, a distinction is made between its educa- 
tional value and its import as an activity in the greater world; thus 
geometry is taught as a training in logic, the use of tools as ‘ hand and 
eye training,’ and so forth. From the standpoint I ask you to adopt that 
distinction is unjustifiable and may be dangerously misleading; it has, I 
fear, often been a source of aridity and unfruitfulness in school teaching. 
The mistake consists in supposing that the disciplinary value can be 
separated from the concrete historical character of the subject as a 
stream of cultural tradition. The discipline of the school workshop 
consists in using the tools of the craftsman for purposes cognate with 
his and inspired by his achievements. It is because this has not always 
been done that methods of ‘ manual training’ have too often falsified 
the expectations of their advocates. Similarly the discipline of school 
geometry consists not in mastering an abstract scheme or formula of 
argumentation, but in steeping one’s mind in a certain noble tradition of 
intellectual activity and in gradually acquiring the interests, mental 
