8o EDUCATION OF A MAN OF SCIENCE 



of children, where the citizens are saturated in the 

 traditions and conventions peculiar to themselves, 

 and are, for more than half their lives, deprived 

 of the saner ideals of grown-up people. Before we 

 went to school we were taught by governesses. I 

 cannot help wishing that we had had foreign 

 teachers who would have taught us to speak their 

 language — a thing that can be done so easily in 

 childhood. I have never got over the want of 

 fluent French and German, and I resent the fact 

 that I should be condemned to feel like a child or a 

 boor in the presence of foreigners. We are taught 

 Latin and Greek because, as we are assured, they 

 introduce us to the finest literature in the world. 

 To most boys they do nothing of the kind, and are 

 an intolerable burden. French and German taught 

 by the oral methods really do introduce us to 

 whole nations of minds that are otherwise cut off 

 from us ; and not merely minds mirrored in books, 

 but more especially those of human beings as given 

 in speech. 



This is all very famihar, I only mention it 

 because it is a special case of a wider question, 

 namely : How much can be safely poured into a 

 receptive child which he will be thankful for as 

 he gets older ? I mean, rather : What is the 

 proportion that ought to be maintained between 

 learning to reason, e.g., Euclid; exercising the 

 attentive faculties, e.g., in plodding through a Latin 

 book with a dictionary ; and the more or less 

 mechanical acquirement, as in learning by heart ? 

 Why was I not taught addition by memorising 

 tables as in the case of multiplication ? It could 



