roughly nice,
reasonable, sensible, and good-humoured creatures, but knowing next to
nothing, without intellectual interests, and, indeed, honestly
despising them. I do not want to exaggerate; and I will frankly confess
that there were always a few well-educated boys among them; but these
were boys of real ability, with an aptitude for classics. And as
providing a classical education, the system was effective, though
cumbrous; hampered and congested by the other subjects, which were well
enough taught, but which had no adequate time given to them, and
intruded upon the classics without having opportunity to develop
themselves. It is a melancholy picture, but the result certainly was
that intellectual cynicism was the note of the place.

The pity of it is that the machinery was all there; cheerful industry
among masters and boys alike; but the whole thing frozen and chilled,
partly by the congestion of subjects, partly by antiquated methods.

Moreover, to provide a classical education for the best boys,
everything else was sacrificed. The boys were taught classics, not on
the literary method, but on the academic method, as if they were all to
enter for triposes and scholarships, and to end by becoming professors.
Instead of simply reading away at interesting and beautiful books, and
trying, to cover some ground, a great quantity of pedantic grammar was
taught; time was wasted in trying to make the boys compose in both
Latin and Greek, when they had no vocabulary, and no knowledge of the
languages. It was like setting children of six and seven to write
English in the style of Milton and Carlyle.

The solution is a very obvious one; it is, at all costs to simplify,
and to relieve pressure. The staple of education should be French, easy
mathematics, history, geography, and popular science. I would not even
begin Latin or Greek at first. Then, when the first stages were over, I
would have every boy with any special gift put to a single subject, in
which he should try to make real progress, but so that there would be
time to keep up the simpler subjects as well. The result would be that
when a boy had finished his course, he would have some one subject
which he could reasonably be expected to have mastered up to a certain
point. He would have learnt classics, or mathematics, or history, or
modern languages, or science, thoroughly; while all might hope to have
a competent knowledge of French, English, history, easy mathemati