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true power of this kind, I think, even more than their elders, 

 and their fresh young minds can perhaps judge the capability 

 to use such power even without its actual exhibition, and their 

 admiration readily lays a foundation for that friendship, and the 

 getting the boys on the side of the masters on which Thring 

 lays so much emphasis. For this purpose the masters should 

 join in the boys' games, and meet them outside the school-room 

 and clear of its formalities. "It is most refreshing," he says, 

 " to emerge from a slaughter-house of concords, moods and 

 tenses, strewed with murdered participles of language, into the 

 open air ; most refreshing instead of looking on boys as reser- 

 voirs of bad grammar and vexation, to escape to a thorough 

 good game and restore the balance of human nature by a hearty 

 sense on both sides of both understanding a good drive or cut," 

 and so on. It goes without saying that no master can command 

 either respect or sympathy whose moral character is not also of 

 the highest. Whatever a few black sheep may think the mass 

 of the school will respect a true man. The teachers should also 

 be men whose hearts have not grown cold with age, men who 

 are still within hail of the age of their pupils, and above all, 

 men who have the ability to teach. 



Unless in the rare cases where this high teaching power is 

 combined with great learning, in a way too excellent to be 

 common, it is perhaps better that the teacher should not be too 

 far advanced beyond the pupil in knowledge of his subject, 

 since unless they have intense sympathy, men of great learn- 

 ing are prone to forget the tyro's difficulties, and so fail to make 

 matters clear from omitting some point unknown to the pupil, 

 but for which with them familiarity may have bred contempt. 



True education progresses by contact of mind with mind, 

 therefore let the tone of the school be the very highest attainable, 

 especially let the teachers be true men unsullied by any 

 meaner objects. Let them be like what Socrates defined him- 

 self as, — A man midwife for mind, who assisted other people to 

 bring into the world new births of mind. Socrates who, as 

 Thring puts it, taught nothing, and would himself have been 

 plucked in a modern competitive examination, yet produced 

 disciples who learned everything. 



