226 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
and I thought I had by mistake been sent one of the many books of my own 
time, because we all declared then that Education was at the Cross Roads, 
and now a century after, I find Education is still at the same Cross Roads. 
We did not know what was the purpose of Education—whether it was 
purely utilitarian to enable the educated to earn a better living than the 
uneducated, or to make them better craftsmen, or to train them for a 
profession, or merely to become as virtuous and happy as they could make 
themselves or others would allow them to be. And I find you are arguing 
just as passionately as we did all these things to-day. In my time someone 
solved all our difficulties by saying that education was not for any of these 
things but for life. No one could say, unfortunately, what life was for 
which we were to be educated, and if he defined it, everyone else said 
life was something quite different. Everything was altering so rapidly, 
and there were so many different lives and no one could say which of 
them was going to be the life of each different boy and girl, that we got 
very angry with each other and before anything could be decided, I fell 
asleep. And now that I am awake again, I am terrified at the world 
round me, not because it is so wonderful and strange with its motor cars, 
and aeroplanes and wireless and electric light and cooking, and gas and 
fountain pens and typewriters and telephones and telegraphs and your 
wonderful newspapers which come out every hour, but because it is 
changing so rapidly every month and every day. People to-day are such 
a perplexing compound of the primitive—for you thieve and murder and 
tell lies and get drunk and run away with each other’s wives, just as we 
did—mixed up with the purely artificial which is the result of all your 
inventions—which are like a very tight corset all over a savage’s body, 
that I do not know how you can educate for life to-day, because by the 
time that you have educated the boy and the girl the life will be absolutely 
altered. And so I end with a concrete question. For what kind of life — 
do you educate a girl, just to be a voter, which she certainly will be if she 
lives till twenty-one, whether she wants a vote or not, or to be a film actress 
or a cook or a mother or an old maid, none of which she may ever be ?’ 
Thus far Rip Van Winkle. Hard questions, if I may venture to say 
so of my venerable friend, and going to the root of many problems. 
Let me conclude by inviting you to concentrate on four points which 
are bound to find a place in any forecast of the future. 
First, the Science of Psychology is obviously only in its infancy—the | 
stage which Chemistry had reached when Dalton formulated his celebrated 
law which modern chemistry no longer accepts. What can we expect 
from Psychology judging from what it has already done? I am not 
concerned here with the inexhaustible possibilities opening up in the 
medical, and particularly the pathological, sphere and the field of thera- 
peutic action. No sound educational results, as far as I can see, are going 
to come from applications from the abnormal to the normal, unless we 
accept an assumption that it is the abnormal that is really normal, which 
is like assuming in medicine that disease is the rule and health the 
exception. I look to much real help coming from Intelligence Tests, 
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however unsatisfactory they may be at present. and in two supremely — 
important directions. 
For, if we can once really establish what everyone from Aristotle to 
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