L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 269 
is studied the more significant for after-life the experience during the 
years of adolescence is seen to be. Its importance is not a modern 
discovery ; for even the primitive races knew it, and the historic Churches 
have always taken account of it in their teaching and discipline. But 
the problems of what has ever been a fateful period have acquired under 
modern conditions of life a new urgency. Parents and teachers have 
worried over them, devoted club-workers have wrestled with them, 
' novelists and psychologists have studied them. In connection with the 
psychologists, mention of Dr. Stanley Hall’s monumental work is as 
inevitable as it is now superfluous; reference should, however, be made 
to the recent memoir in which Dr. Ernest Jones has freshly illuminated 
the old idea that the onset of adolescence marks a definite break and 
recommencement in mental growth. Especially interesting is the 
parallelism he establishes between the successive phases of childhood 
and the corresponding phases of youth. But though in a sense the 
adolescent retravels a psychological route which he has already traversed 
in childhood, he is, of course, capable of vastly deeper and wider vision 
and experience. The case for universal education beyond the age of 
fourteen depends ultimately upon the importance of shaping his new 
capabilities in conformity with the finer traditions of civilised life. 
Public opinion, regretting the generous gesture of 1918, has not at the 
moment accepted the larger view of the mission of education; but as 
the nation learns to care more for the quality of its common manhood 
and womanhood and understands more clearly the conditions upon 
which that quality depends, the forward movement, now unhappily 
arrested, will certainly be resumed. For that better time we must 
prepare and build. 
There is another objection to which I should think it unseemly to 
refer if it were not a stumbling-block to so many persons of good will. 
A liberal public education will, they fear, make people unwilling to do 
much of the world’s work which, though disagreeable, must still be 
carried on. The common sense of Dr. Johnson gaye the proper reply 
a hundred and fifty years ago. Being asked whether the establishment 
of a school on his friend Bennet Langton’s estate would not tend to 
make the people less industrious, ‘ No, sir,’ said Johnson, ‘ while learn- 
ing to read and write is a distinction, the few who have that distinction 
may be the less inclined to work; but when everybody learns to read 
and write it is no longer a distinction. A man who has a laced waist- 
coat is too fine a man to work; but if everybody had laced waistcoats, 
we should have people working in laced waistcoats.’ 
Lastly, complaint may be made that in all this discourse about the 
finer values nothing has been said about the ordinary utilities, and the 
ironical may ask whether it is an error to suppose that the education 
of the people should furnish them with useful knowledge and abilities. 
Now the test of utility which the plain man applies to education is, in 
principle. sound and indispensable; it is, in fact, congruent with the 
biological origin and function of the educational progress. The only point 
doubtful is whether the test is always based upon a sufficiently broad 
idea of utility. The only satisfactory definition of the useful is that it 
contributes definitely and positively to fullness of life. From that point 
