THACHERS AND THEIR PUPILS 593 
to all the best traditions of school teaching, and to the often-expressed 
desire of the universities to insure a good general education in those 
whom they admit. There should, I think, be no scholarship exam- 
ination which does not include several of the subjects of a normal school 
curriculum, however much additional weight may be given to any of 
them. Although it may be necessary that university entrance scholar- 
ships in one subject should be given either to encourage its study or to 
discover those who have a special aptitude, yet, so far as scholarships 
are intended to be rewards for intellectual preeminence, they should, 
I think, be directed to general capacity, and not be used as an encour- 
agement to limited study. From what I have already said it will be 
clear that I do not attach much importance to special preparation at 
school for those who intend to proceed to the university. If a boy has 
a very special taste or aptitude, it should have abundant opportunity 
for displaying and exercising itself at the university, provided only 
that it has not been stifled, but has been given some encouragement in 
the school curriculum. I understand, for example, that those who 
teach such a subject as physiology at the university would prefer that 
their pupils should come to them from school with a general knowledge 
of chemistry and physics rather than that they should have received 
training in physiology. With the present modern differentiation into 
a classical and modern side, or their equivalents, the ordinary school 
subjects should be sufficient preparation for any university course if 
they are not mutually strangled in the pressure of an overcrowded 
curriculum. 
To be fair, however, I must state another view. A very experienced 
college tutor who has had previous valuable experience as a master in a 
public school tells me that in his opinion the real problem of the public 
schools is the “arrest of intellectual development that overtakes so 
many boys at about the age of sixteen.” “There are few public 
schools,” he says, “ whose fifth forms are not full of boys of seventeen 
or eighteen, many of them perfectly orderly, well-mannered and reason- 
able, in some sense the salt of the place, exercising great influence in 
the school and exercising it well, with a high standard of public spirit, 
kindly and straight-living, in whom, nevertheless, it is difficult to 
recognize the bright, intelligent, if not very industrious, child of two 
or three years before.” 
He thinks that there is a real danger of degeneration at this age, 
owing, for one thing, to the manner in which the boys are educated 
en bloc; up to a certain age boys can be herded together and taught on 
the same lines without great harm being done, but after a certain time 
differentiation begins to set in. The school curriculum, however, does 
not admit of being adjusted to suit the dawning interests of a couple 
of hundred boys; and he sees no cure for this difficulty except a con- 
siderable increase in the staff and a corresponding reduction in the size 
