PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION. 



Ill 



and specially with the most abnormal and unexpected of all 

 things — his fellow man."* I think that the real test, therefore, 

 of the worth of public school education is this ; not whether it 

 produces instructed boys, but whether it produces boys capable 

 of dealing with their fellow men as leaders, companions, followers, 

 in industry, in government, and in the various relations of life. 

 What a boy knows is less important than what he is. But we are 

 not entitled on that account to neglect his equipment on the side 

 of knowledge. The common cavil that our boys leave us knowing 

 nothing after four years of effort is no doubt to be taken as an 

 EngUshman's form of pleasantry. But what the public schools 

 neither do nor set out to do is to equip more than a few of their 

 pupils with a fund of specialised knowledge, and these few only 

 after the general groundwork has been adequately laid. It 

 is in this, I think, that, at their present stage, they have attempted 

 to strike the balance between two principles, the old and the 

 new. The old principle insisted that a boy should be forced 

 to learn a number of things because his masters thought them 

 good for him ; the newer principle declares that a boy should only 

 learn what his inclination suggests. The public school desires 

 that all boys should learn certain things up to a point at which he 

 has on the one hand acquired a fund of general knowledge — ■ 

 resources upon which he can draw and which he can enlarge as 

 the circumstances of life may require — and on the other hand 

 has both the experience and the data upon which to base his 

 choice of further study in one selected direction. It is at this 

 stage that the abler boy develops into the scholar, taking either 

 Classics or History or Modern Languages or Science or Mathe- 

 matics as his special sphere. 



But what is, and what should be, the nature of the preliminary 

 training before that point, which the future scholar shares with 

 the rest of his schoolfellows, the great majority, whose abilities 

 will never make scholars of them or take them much beyond 

 that limit ? The prevailing tendency is to make this preliminary 

 training one from which the classics are excluded. My own 

 belief is that a general training which includes a modified study 

 of the classics is the wiser course. May I quote some lines that 

 I penned a few months ago in support of this belief ? 



* A Study of Silent Minds, by K. E. Kirk. (Student Christian 

 Movement.) 



