r68 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVI. No. 411. 



taught Latin, and when he leaves school 

 for the army or any other pursuit open to 

 average boys he cannot write a letter, he 

 cannot construct a grammatical sentence, 

 he cannot describe anything he has seen. 

 The public-school curriculum is always 

 growing, and it is never subtracted from or 

 rearranged. There is one subject which 

 ordinary schoolmasters can teach well- 

 Latin.* The other usual nine subjects have 

 * Only one subject — ^Latin — is really educational 

 in our schools. I do not mean that the average 

 boy reads any Latin author after he leaves school, 

 or knows any Latin at all ten years after he leaves 

 school. I do not mean that his Latin helps him 

 even slightly in learning any modern language, 

 for he is always found to be ludicrously ignorant 

 of French or German, even after an elaborate 

 course of instruction in these languages. I do 

 not mean that his Latin helps him in studying 

 English, for he can hardly write a sentence with- 

 out error. I do not mean that it makes him fond 

 of literature, for of ancient literature or history 

 he never has any knowledge except that Caesar 

 wrcite a book for the third form, and on English 

 literature his mind is a blank. But I do mean 

 that as the ordinary public-school master is really 

 able to give a boy easy mental exercises through 

 the study of Latin, this subject is in quite a dif- 

 ferent position from that of the others. If any 

 proof of this statement is wanted, it will be found 

 in the published utterances of all sorts of men — 

 military officers, business men, lawyers, men of 

 science and others — who, confessedly ignorant of 

 ' the tongues,' get into a state of rapture over 

 their school experiences and the efficiency of Latin 

 as a means of education. All this comes from 

 the fact, which schoolboys are sharp enough to 

 observe, that English schoolmasters can teach 

 Latin well, and they do not take much interest 

 in teaching anything else. It is a power, inherited 

 from the Middle Ages, when there really was a 

 simple system of education. I ask for a return 

 to simplicity of system. English (the King's 

 English; I exclude Johnsonese) is probably the 

 richest, the most complex language, the one most 

 worthy of philologic study; English literature is 

 certainly more valuable than any ancient or 

 modern literature of any one other country, yet 

 admiration for it among learned Englishmen is 

 wonderfully mi.xed with patronage and even con- 

 tempt. At present, is there one man who can 

 teach English as Latin is taught by nearly every 



gradually been added to the curriculum 



master of every school ? Just imagine that Eng- 

 lish could be so taught by teachers capable of 

 rising to the level of our literature! 



I have often to give advice to parents. I find 

 the average parent exceedingly ignorant of his 

 son's character or inclinations or ability. He 

 pays a schoolmaster handsomely for taking his 

 son off his hands except during holidays. Dur- 

 ing the holidays, so terrible to a parent, he sees 

 his son as little as possible. One question always 

 asked is : Do you think it better to have ' theoret- 

 ical ' instruction (they always call it by this ab- 

 surd name) before or after an actual apprentice- 

 ship in works? Of course, such a question cannot 

 be answered off-hand. You tell the parent, to his 

 great astonishment, that you must see the boy 

 himself. When at length you see him, the chances 

 are that you will find him to be what the school- 

 masters are making of all our average boys. No 

 part of his school work has been a pleasure to 

 him, and, although he has had to work hard at 

 his books, not one of the above three powers is 

 his: power to use books and to write his own lan- 

 guage; the language of his nurse, his mother, his 

 mistress that is to be, his enemies and friends; 

 the only language in which he thinks — power 

 to compute and a liking for computation — power 

 to understand a little of natural phenomena. Hon- 

 estly, 1 practically never find that such a boy has 

 had any education at all except what he has ob- 

 tained at home or from his school companions 

 or from his sports. Even his sports are to keep 

 him healthy of body only, and not at all to culti- 

 vate his mental powers. Those old games like 

 ' prisoners' base,' which really develop in a won- 

 derful way not only all the inuscles of the body, 

 but also the thinlving power, are scorned in the 

 public schools. Think now how such a boy is 

 handicapped if we pitchfork him into works where 

 it is nobody's duty to teach him anything, or 

 send him to college, where he cannot understand 

 the lectures. Of course, if he is very eager to 

 be an engineer he will, by hook or by crook, get 

 to understand things. I have met some such 

 men — clever, successful engineers in spite of all 

 sorts of adverse circumstances — but the best of 

 them are willing to admit that they are, and have 

 always been, greatly hurt by the absence of the 

 three powers which I have specified. And if this 

 has been so in the past, when the scientific prin- 

 ciples underlying engineering have been simple, 

 how much more so is it now, when every new dis- 

 covery in physics is producing new branches of 

 engineering! 



