LIBERAL EDUCATION. 7 



stages of all studies whatever. The child, as well as the man, is linguist, 

 student of science, artist, philosopher, moralist, poet, though his philol- 

 ogy, science, art, philosophy, will be childish, not manly, germs and in- 

 tuitions, not results of developed reason. Is it not obvious that in this 

 view elementary schools become something far more than places for 

 drilling the youthful mind in the use of the mere tools of knowledge ? 

 Is it not obvious, moreover, that, looked at from this point of view, a 

 man's profession is only the outgrowth and fruitful consummation of 

 his whole training ; a divergence, when the time arrives that the whole 

 of knowledge becomes too wide a field to cultivate, into some special 

 fruit-bearing direction, which, whatever it may be, will lead to a truly 

 liberal profession, inasmuch as by a man so trained his calling cannot 

 but be followed in a liberal spirit ? 



We have in England and America no conception of what may be 

 accomplished in the early stages of education, because we have been, 

 to so great an extent, adherents of the grindstone-theory. " No- 

 where," says Mr. Joseph Payne, commenting on the lamentable, almost 

 ludicrous, failure of that embodiment of the grindstone-theory, applied 

 to popular teaching through the medium, not of the Latin grammar, 

 but of the three R's — I mean the so-called English " Revised Code " — 

 " nowhere have I ever met, in the course of long practice and study 

 in teaching, with a more striking illustration of the great truth that, 

 just in proportion as you substitute mechanical routine for intelligent 

 and sympathetic development of the child's powers, you shall fail in 

 the object you are aiming at." ' I think that the insignificant results 

 of our present elementary schools, as compared with the amount of 

 time, thought, and money, expended on them, and their want of real 

 vitality, are to be mainly traced to this fundamentally false concep- 

 tion of elementary teaching as concerned only with the acquisition of 

 the mere tools of knowledge. 2 By its fruits, or rather by its barren- 



1 " Of four-fifths of the scholars about to leave school, either no account, or an unsat- 

 isfactory one, is given by an examination of the most strictly elementary kind " (Report 

 for 1869-"70). " We have never yet passed 20,000 in a population of 20,000,000 to the 

 sixth standard ; whereas old Prussia, without her recent aggrandizement, passed nearly 

 380,000 every year" (speech of Mr. Mundella, in the House of Commons, March 18, 

 18*70). " What we call education in the inspected schools of England is the mere seed 

 used in other countries, but with us that seed, as soon as it has sprouted, withers and 

 dies, and never grows up into a crop for the feeding of the nations " (speech of Dr. 

 Lyon Playfair, in the House of Commons, June 20, 1870). See the Fortnightly Review 

 for August, 1873, and Payne in Social Science Transactions for 1872. If we should ever 

 need — which God forbid ! — a warning against the folly of substituting a sectarian for a 

 national system of popular education, we may find it in the wretched perversion of Eng- 

 lish popular education in the hands of her Established Church. 



2 " What wonder if very recently an appeal has been made to statistics for the pro- 

 foundly foolish purpose of showing that education is of no good — that it diminishes 

 neither misery nor crime among the masses of mankind ? I reply, Why should the thing 

 which has been called education do either the one or the other ? If I am a knave or a 

 fool, teaching me to read and write won't make me less of either one or the other — 



