cation, and we must not expect to
have got rid of them altogether. An educational atmosphere is not
changed in twenty years.

But our High Schools are a very real step in advance. The numbers of
your school show that there is a considerable and increasing fraction of
residents in Bath who do care for the intellectual quality of the
education of their girls; and the report of the examiners is a most
satisfactory guarantee that the instruction given here is thoroughly
efficient along the whole line. Bath must be congratulated on its High
School for Girls, as it must be congratulated on its College for Boys.

But are we therefore to rest and be thankful in the complacent belief
that we have now at length attained perfection, at least in our High
Schools? I am called in to bless High School education, and I do bless
it from my heart. I know something of it. My own daughter was at such a
school; I have been vice-president of a High School for ten years. I
wish there were High Schools in every town in England. They have done
and are doing much to lift the standard of girls' education in England.
But I will again remind you that High Schools are educating but a
fraction of the population, and that the faults of twenty years ago
still characterise our girls' education as a whole.

And now, having said this, I shall not be misunderstood if I go on to
speak of some of the deficiencies in our ideals of girls' education
which seem to me to affect High Schools as well as all other schools.
One point, in which the older education with its manifold defects had a
real merit, is that there was no over-teaching, no hurry to produce
results, and therefore no disgust aroused with learning and literature.
At any rate, the girls, or the best of them, left school or governess
"with an appetite." Now I consider this is a real test of teaching at
school or college, in science or literature: does it leave boys and
girls hungry for more, with such a love for learning that they will go
on studying of themselves? If the teaching of some science is such that
you never want to go to another science lecture as long as you live:
your lessons on literature such that your Shakespeare, your Spenser,
your Burke, your Browning will never again descend from your shelves:
then, whatever else schools may have done, they have sacrificed the
future to the present. It is on this account that the pressure of
external examinations and its effect on the teaching o