L.— EDUCATION. 251 



There are three main stages in the educational career of the average 

 student — the primary or preparatory school, in which it seems desirable 

 especially to arouse the interest of the boy ; the secondary school, in which 

 discipline might form the dominating note ; and the university, in which 

 more individuality is permissible, and the student should be given an oppor- 

 tunity of being more contemplative as specialisation approaches. It 

 seems to me that if a student is expected to form his own ideas and to 

 work out for himself the meaning of facts, his mental operations should 

 not be disturbed by the rapid intake of unrelated groups of data. It is 

 difficult for a housewife to put a room straight if the furniture is all put in 

 before the carpet is laid ; nor can picture-hanging and paper-hanging be 

 carried on simultaneously. 



Critics of the tandem system say, on superficial consideration, that if 

 a student be examined in a subject finally and for good at the end of his 

 first college term, he must necessarily forget the subject soon after and 

 almost completely before the end of his third year. That is not in 

 accordance with my observation. It is difficult, however, to obtain 

 strictly comparative data on this jjoint ; for all observations are neces- 

 sarily made on different students who would differ in any event ; but my 

 residual impression, as the result of the oral examination of candidates 

 before Committees of Selection for appointments, is that the man who has 

 been trained by the tandem system retains a clearer and cleaner recol- 

 lection of his subjects than those who have been trained by the composite 

 system. Whatever be the end in view — whether administration, business, 

 or the academic life — it is important precisely to know what one knows 

 and what one does not know. 



There are special virtues in many systems of education : we have not 

 yet discovered any that is universally applicable to the exclusion of others ; 

 and so with these two alternatives, which have been hitherto the main 

 difficulty in fitting the Imperial College into the London University 

 complex, each has its own merits. The institution of Honours schools 

 is in itself a partial recognition of the tandem system, but we carry the 

 principle much further at South Kensington by adopting it at an earlier 

 stage and even in the Honours stage itself by subdivision of the final 

 subject ; and especially by holding examinations after each Part, instead 

 of in a group of subjects at the end of the training. 



When anyone engaged in practical education presses attention on a 

 feature that he thinks to be too much neglected by others, it is not unusual 

 to hear his principles spoken of as fads, which merely shows how far we 

 have yet to travel before we can regard education as an organised science. 

 This much is said to anticipate the label that some would use for my 

 second point — the value of humanism in science teaching. 



Under the tyranny of terminology our classical friends have usurped 

 the * humanities.' But they sometimes forget, through their specialisa- 

 tion in the purely rhetorical aspects of classical literature, that what 

 gave rise to the Renaissance was the discovery of the long-buried wisdom, 

 especially of the Greeks — -their art, their religion, and their science. 

 The revolt of the intellect from previous formalism and theological 

 bondage resulted in more than the revival of literature and art, more 

 than the religious freedom which gave us the Reformation : it aroused 



