r
Classic!

Yet in a dim confused way I think he was making out a case. In schools
as we knew them, and with the sort of assistant available, the sort of
assistant who has been trained entirely on the old lines, he could
see no other teaching so effectual in developing attention, restraint,
sustained constructive effort and various yet systematic adjustment. And
that was as far as his imagination could go.

It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end them;
the curriculum and the social organisation of the English public school
are the crowning instances of that. They go on because they have begun.
Schools are not only immortal institutions but reproductive ones. Our
founder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, I am sure, of Gates' pedagogic
values and would, I feel certain, have dealt with them disrespectfully.
But public schools and university colleges sprang into existence
correlated, the scholars went on to the universities and came back to
teach the schools, to teach as they themselves had been taught, before
they had ever made any real use of the teaching; the crowd of boys
herded together, a crowd perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same,
adjusted itself by means of spontaneously developed institutions. In
a century, by its very success, this revolutionary innovation of
Renascence public schools had become an immense tradition woven closely
into the fabric of the national life. Intelligent and powerful people
ceased to talk Latin or read Greek, they had got what was wanted, but
that only left the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point. Since
most men of any importance or influence in the country had been through
the mill, it was naturally a little difficult to persuade them that
it was not quite the best and most ennobling mill the wit of man could
devise. And, moreover, they did not want their children made strange to
them. There was all the machinery and all the men needed to teach the
old subjects, and none to teach whatever new the critic might propose.
Such science instruction as my father gave seemed indeed the uninviting
alternative to the classical grind. It was certainly an altogether
inferior instrument at that time.

So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languages
for seven long years. It was the strangest of detachments. We would sit
under the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures who had fallen
into an enchanted pit, and he would do his considerab