February 18, 1887. j 



SCIENCE. 



173 



years ; and thirty had not reached it at all. Such 

 a state of things appeared to him intolerable, and 

 he had fully made up his mind to deal with it. 



The experience of the continent was wholly op- 

 posed to the English plan. At Basel, no language 

 except the mother-tongue was learned till ten, 

 then Latin was begun, and French and German 

 not till thirteen. The evidence from Germany 

 was more pertinent, for there both systems had 

 been tried. In the gymnasia of Hanover, before 

 the year 1866, Greek had been begun in tertia 

 (average age thirteen), whereas in Prussia it was 

 begun in guarta (average age twelve). After 

 1866, the Hanoverian system was brought into 

 uniformity with the Prussian, and this was con- 

 tinued till six years ago, when it was determined 

 not to begin Greek till fourteen. The testimony 

 of the professors of Hanover is, that, at eighteen, 

 boys know just as much Greek by beginning at 

 fourteen as by begiiining at twelve. 



Passing to his second proposition. Dr. Fearon 

 maintained that other subjects were squeezed out 

 by the premature study of Greek. In the last five 

 years they had had boys from 135 preparatory 

 schools. He had sent a circular to sixty-two of 

 the more important among them, and received an- 

 swers from forty-five. One of the questions he 

 had asked, was, " Do the requirements of public 

 schools compel you to disregard subjects to which 

 you consider more importance ought to be paid ? '' 

 To this question, twenty-one had answered ' no,' 

 and twenty-three ' yes,' but he confessed that the 

 question was a wicked one, and that he could 

 hardly "expect masters to pass condemnation on 

 their own system of teaching. In this matter they 

 must go behind the judgment of preparatory mas- 

 ters, and he found by experience that it was pre- 

 cisely in this matter that preparatory masters 

 erred and came short. They sent to Winchester, 

 boys admirably grounded in Latin grammar, but 

 sadly deficient in English history and French. In 

 the last year he had been advised to reject boys 

 for total ignorance of French. And he found, 

 moreover, not only that the most backward boys 

 in Latin and Greek were the most backward in 

 French, but also that they were comparatively 

 more backward in French than in classics, proving 

 that all their energy had been put into Greek and 

 Latin. The only safe guide in this question was 

 to look to the training of boys' minds and educa- 

 tion generally. To judge from the experience of 

 the teachers of lower forms, and his own experi- 

 ence as an examiner, the boys who were best at a 

 mechanical knowledge of Greek grammar were 

 those who were getting least good as to the culture 

 of general intelligence. He was convinced, from 

 his own observation, that the two main difficulties 



of young boys arose from the multiplicity of sub- 

 jects, and from the number of subjects all of the 

 same kind. Their brains got perfectly muddled 

 by being driven from one point to another. So 

 far from the study of Greek suffering by the 

 change, he believed that it would gain. Boys 

 would come more freshly to the subject at thir- 

 teen or fourteen, with minds more matured, and 

 able to see the points that masters were driving at, 

 and we should rid of one absurdity our present 

 Procrustean education. 



In conclusion, he recommended: 1°, That the 

 study of Greek should not begin before the age of 

 thirteen or fourteen, and that it should not be 

 introduced at all in the entrance examinations of 

 public schools. This step he intended to carry out 

 himself. 2°, That Greek should be rigidly excluded 

 from examinations for entrance scholarships. 

 Latin and English would afford a much sounder 

 test, and it would be a great advantage to have 

 from the first the teaching of Greek in their own 

 hand. 3°, He would give up Greek with boys 

 who showed no taste for Greek, or who intended 

 to leave school at seventeen. He knew that this 

 declaration would lose him votes, but he could not 

 himself continue the system which allowed boys 

 to be studying Greek delectus for ten years. They 

 could not dictate to preparatory schools, but these 

 would follow if the head masters gave them a 

 lead. By thus postponing and limiting the study 

 of Greek, they would do nothing to injure the 

 cause of Greek scholarship, and they would do 

 much to set the education of the country on a 

 more satisfactory basis than it was at present. 



Famihar as this sort of argument is in the 

 United States and on the continent of Europe, it 

 is still considered ultra-radical in England ; and it 

 is somewhat surprising that Dr. Fearon's resolu- 

 tions and remarks met with no greater opposition 

 than they did. In fact, a number of head masters 

 sided more or less strongly with Dr. Fearon. No 

 immediate action was taken on the resolutions by 

 the conference, however, and they were referred 

 to a committee, after having an amendment to the 

 effect, that, "it is desirable to arrive at some 

 greater agreement as to the stage in ediication 

 which should be reached before Greek is begun by 

 boys intended for a classical school," tacked on to 

 them. 



THE GREEK ELEMENT IN ENGLISH. 



The crusade against the study of Greek, which 

 is the fashion just now, is not always successfully 

 met by the defenders of that study, because they 

 either understate their own position or else miss 

 altogether the true point of the discussion. The 



