is being subjected to this repulsive
treatment to do something which will fit him to maintain a place in
life where he will be as little liable as possible to the changes and
vicissitudes of civilised existence.

"The cumbrous and inadequate preparation which is now in vogue can
scarcely be spoken of by a person of understanding without the use of
language unbefitting one who is a member of (inter alia) the Reformed
Church and the highest order of the vertebrates.

"If one walks into any school in this kingdom one is certain to meet a
tall, thin, anaemic youth with a draggled moustache and a worried eye
who is endeavouring to coerce a mass of indigestible, inelastic and
unimportant facts into the heads of divers sleepy and disgusted
children. If a small boy, on being asked where Labrador is, replies
that it is the most northerly point of the Berlin Archipelago, he may
be wrong in quite a variety of ways, but even if he answered correctly
he would still know just as little about the matter, while if he were
to give the only proper reply to so ridiculous a conundrum, he would
tell his tormentor that he did not care a rap where it was, that he had
not put it there, and that he would tell his mother if the man did not
leave him alone. What has he got to do with Labrador, Terra del Fuego,
or the Isles of Greece? Give him a fistful of facts about Donnybrook,
and send him away to hunt out the truth of it, with a sandwich in his
pocket and the promise of a lump of toffee when he came back with his
cargo of truths--that would interest him, the toffee would make the
information stick, while the verification of his facts would make his
head fat and fertile.

"When we ceased to be natural creatures and put on the oppressive
shrouds, wraps and disguises which we label in the villainous aggregate
civilisation, we ceased to know either how to teach or how to learn.
We exchanged the freedom and spaciousness of life for a cramped
existence compounded of spectacles and bad grammar, this complicated
still further by the multiplication tables, the dead languages and
indigestion tabloids. During his school-days many a healthy boy had to
parse ten square miles of dead language. Why? he does not know and he
will never be told, for no one else knows any more than he. The only
thing of which he is certain is, that he did not do anything to deserve
it.

"Civilisation, which is responsible for all the woes of life, such as
washing, shaving a