L.—EDUCATION. 201 
test of the teacher’s work—the test of how do they employ their leisure ? 
Surely the thought-free idleness at cottage door, the friendly banter in the 
village tap-room, or the arguments at the workmen’s club are not so vapid, 
so unrefreshing, as the ‘ Revues’ and many of the half-decent dramas 
and books with which ‘ the more educated ’ kill their leisure time. 
Another cause for the undue complication of the warp and its machinery 
is the desire to give by education a bias in the direction of some particular 
vocation. We should be all at one in condemning such attempts before the 
child is thirteen, but after that age some other metaphor is needed and the 
work should be left to the less rigid woof. The very word ‘ bias’ suggests a 
dead-weight, an insidious approach, a crafty twist of hand. Itis surely voca- 
tional inspiration that is needed rather than vocational bias, and the in- 
spiration must come from the teacher—from the woof, not the warp—and 
such inspiration will never be given as long as teachers proclaim themselves 
to be mainly occupied in teaching the young how to make a good and happy 
use of their leisure. This is a pose we have assumed of late years. We have 
been patted on the back for it on prize days; we have boasted of it in 
those secret conferences when teachers modestly make known their 
virtues to a misunderstanding public. Oh, if only we could teach the 
secret of getting happiness from work! Leisure will always look after 
itself. A man who enjoys his work will enjoy his leisure. It may seem a 
desperate task to attempt to make some of the work of the world even 
tolerable, much less pleasant as a pastime. How can the service of a 
machine, the repetition work of a factory, the doing of such menial tasks 
as washing or scavenging, ever be anything but wearisome? Well, I 
have seen much happiness harvested in a laundry. Repetition work has 
been made tolerable under wise and blessed welfare work. We need to teach 
_ more convincingly how to break the spell of gold, how to measure happi- 
ness not by ‘ the purple of great place,’ but by some other standard, how 
_ to sail past seductive prosperity not with hands tied nor with ears stopped 
up with wax, as Ulysses coasted the dangerous shore, but unfettered, 
_ and even attentive to choose a glimpse of truth, a love of beauty, in prefer- 
; ence to worldly or material success. This, after all, is the power that Plato 
_ would have education produce. 
We seem almost to have lost the will to keep by education the pores 
_ of the soul and the mind ever open to the impressions of experience, to 
_ the stirrings of emotion, to the slow and enduring influence of the reason. 
‘We have too often pinned our faith on the production of dexterity, of 
‘mental facility, of almost thoughtless accuracy, and we have our reward 
in our educational looms being ill-adapted to the production of content- 
ment and beauty and the power or the will to reason. 
If it is on the warp that depends the plan of education, if it is in the 
_ warp that extent of opportunities, the aspirations of the community or 
the parent, find expression, sometimes thoughtless, sometimes mistaken 
expression, it is on the woof that the pattern depends, the texture, the 
_ durability, the possibilities, the charm of the fabric or the human 
_ character. And the woof is the teacher’s opportunity. If he is wise he 
will recognise that each individual has not the same aptitudes ; if he is 
wiser still he will refrain from labelling one set of aptitudes as good, another 
as bad. The weaver can see how much yarn he has to work with; by 
fingering it its quality is known to him, but this knowledge is not possessed 
