SCIENCE TEACHING IN ENGLAND 
115 
lying in the middle of a road, demanding only to be removed. 
Every change, of whatsoever kind, creates a certain amount of 
social disturbance, which in itself mav be harmful, and the 
true thinker has not to balance only the profit of the new 
against the profit of the old, but has to reckon in his balance- 
sheet in some way or other with the disturbance which 
has been created, and the cost of making the change. Just as 
when the manufacturer may for years and years go on 
manufacturing his particular type of goods by means of 
machinery which is manifestly old-fashioned and comparatively 
ineffective, when other machinery may be in existence by 
which the same work is much better done, the unthinking are 
apt to jeer. But the manufacturer cannot simply compare 
his profits under the old with those under the new system ; a 
vital factor in his calculation must be the cost of reconstruction. 
Unless the new process will recompense for this it is truer 
economv to go on in the old wav. 
We cannot fully realise the condition of educational 
matters in England without duly considering the fact that until 
only, so to speak, the other day nearly all the education that 
was worthy of the name lay in the hands of the old educational 
foundations of this country. The methods of teaching, the 
subjects taught, were white with the snow of centuries. In 
many cases even the founder’s will strictly defined the nature of 
the bulk of the curriculum, and the schoolmaster was fettered 
more or less closelv by chains forged at a time when education 
had barely escaped from the monopoly of the priesthood and 
the bar. With generation after generation, generation after 
generation, trained upon tlle same narrow lines, we can feel no 
sense of surprise that the schoolmaster’s curriculum became 
surrounded with a halo of mvstic reverence, and that he who 
ventured to touch it even with his thoughts should be deemed 
iconoclastic. It is true that educational reformers came and 
went; the name of Arnold alone might stand in evidence of 
this. But the educational reformer of the past dealt rather 
with the methods than with the subjects of education. Can 
we be surprised then that even to-dav, with the modern spirit 
working strongly within us for years, the fine old crusted 
“ liberal education ” of our grandsires should only have been 
shaken, should liardlv have been reconstructed. It is as hard 
for the leopard to change his spots as for the older type 
of educationalist to change his conviction that the Alpha and 
Omega of a liberal education are summed up in the two words 
“Latin - ’ and “Greek.” A new generation has sprung up, but 
of them it cannot be said that they “knew not Joseph.” They 
are the field in which is being, and has to be, fought out the 
