e the case
until the present methods of instruction have been revolutionized.

The discipline upon which schools pride themselves so much is an
altogether false and pernicious discipline. The only liberty which is
vouchsafed to schoolboys is outside of their work. No doubt it is an
excellent thing that boys should be free to choose the manner in which
they make use of their leisure hours. There would be a great uproar
amongst parents if their sons were forbidden to join in the games they
wished to play, and compelled to play those for which they had no taste.
It would be considered monstrous to remove a boy who was a capital
bowler from the cricket-field, and make him go in for fives or racquets;
or, to use an Eton illustration, to take a 'wet bob' who was a promising
oarsman and might row in the school eight at Henley, and turn him into
the playing-fields to become an inferior 'dry bob.'

But the same arguments that apply to physical discipline apply also to
mental discipline. In the class-room there is practically no latitude
given to the boy at all. In many schools, it is true, there is the
choice of a classical or a modern side; but the choice is the parents',
not the boy's. The latter is always treated, in reference to his
school-work, as a machine. There is simply the offer of a classical
strait-waistcoat or a modern strait-waistcoat; and the boy is put into
one or the other according to the fancy of a third person.

Strait-waistcoats have long been discarded in lunatic asylums. It has
been discovered by medical experts that anything like coercion is the
worst possible treatment for the brain. Whilst our lunatics, however,
are treated in this humane and rational spirit, the educational expert
is busily occupied in destroying the delicate fabric of the schoolboy
brain by the very methods that have been discontinued in the case of
madmen.

The school curriculum, or any other arbitrary course of study, is a
mental strait-waistcoat. It has a more immoral and degenerating effect
upon the mind because it is applied directly. If physical restraint acts
perniciously upon the reasoning powers, a far greater degree of harm
must be caused by direct mental restraint. Yet nobody, from Arnold and
Thring down to the professional crammer of to-day, seems to have grasped
this simple fact.

Schoolmasters are like mothers. They imagine that because a boy happens
to have survived their system of teaching the latter must necessar