198 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
In other ways, the dangers of dependent, unventuresome and even 
servile mentality may be partly met by the school. Young people are 
much more likely to think for themselves, if, subject to the necessary 
framework of school discipline which is scarcely felt so long as it is wisely 
controlled, they do things for themselves. ‘This is well understood in the 
older Public Schools, but I confess that in a great number of Secondary 
Schools—and Secondary Schools are of special importance, because from 
them should come the leaders of opinion in nearly all those smaller circles in 
which, much more than on platforms, public opinion is made as well 
as most of the future teachers of the mass of the people—I should 
like to see a good deal more room for independence and self-government. 
It is bad enough, though perhaps almost inevitable, that everyone now 
plays the same games, which he takes over ready-made, but it is worse that 
even for the purpose of these, the organisation is largely in the hands of 
masters or mistresses ; and the same thing is often true of the School 
Societies. It is impossible to train young people in the free use of judg- 
ment without letting them exercise it freely in their own affairs and (with 
slight and obvious limitations) make their own mistakes, and grow in the 
power of judging how to act and of understanding the characters one of 
another ; for in a free State, the power to choose persons is as important 
as the power to choose between policies, and there is no place so good as 
a school for learning either to lead or to choose and follow a leader. In 
schools in which the leaders are not chosen but imposed, this lesson is 
not learned ; and there must be hundreds of such schools, in which pre- 
fects, captains, debaters, readers of papers are all appointed from above, 
and in which even the prefect is little but a keeper of order in passages, and 
the captain does merely what he is told.* 
The fact that the standard games are provided with such completeness 
of arrangement that the individual has merely to take his place in the 
organisation would matter less if the forms of amusement available, apart 
from the school, gave more scope for individuality; but no one can deny 
the effect of the mechanised drama, which is the almost universal re- 
creation on certain days in the week, in producing a standard mentality 
(one might almost say a uniformity of bad taste) and in confining in- 
terest 1o monotonously narrow lines; and the fact that the interest in 
sport of which our countrymen boast takes for nine-tenths of them the 
form not of healthy personal activity but of massed attendance at the 
performances, provided for them by no effort of their own, of two teams 
of hired entertainers or of a few trained dogs, is not indicative or productive 
of an active intelligence. If education is to counter this, it must encourage 
those occupations of leisure in which the individual can exercise his own 
free choice and express himself—the performance (not merely the hearing) 
4 I have learned something about these things, not only from frequent visits 
to schools, but also from interviewing for some years a large number of candidates 
for admission to my own University, and it is with a thrill of delight which comes 
only too rarely that I hear of schools which seem to have caught something of 
the spirit which animated (for example) Newbury in the headmastership of 
Mr. Sharwood Smith. 
