artists is in itself a less valuable instrument of
education than a knowledge of the lives, motives, and performances of
writers, even though they be Greek.

What our teachers fail in--and the most enthusiastic often fail most
hopelessly--is sympathy and imagination. They cannot conceive that what
moves, touches, and inspires themselves may have no meaning for boys
with a different type of mind.

The result of our education can be well reviewed by one who, like
myself, after wrestling, often very sorrowfully, with the problems of
school education, comes up to a university and gets to know something
of these boys at a later stage. Many of them are fine, vigorous
fellows; but they often tend to look upon their work as a disagreeable
necessity, which they do conscientiously, expecting nothing in
particular from it. They play games ardently, and fill their hours of
leisure with talk about them. Yet one discerns in mind after mind the
germs of intellectual things, undeveloped and bewildered. Many of them
have an interest in something, but they are often ashamed to talk about
it. They have a deep horror of being supposed to be superior; they
listen politely to talk about books and pictures, conscious of
ignorance, not ill-disposed to listen; but it is all an unreal world to
them.

I am all for hard and strenuous work. I do not at all wish to make work
slipshod and dilettante. I would raise the standards of simple
education, and force boys to show that they are working honestly. I
want energy and zeal above everything. But my honest belief is that you
cannot get strenuous and zealous work unless you also have interest and
belief in work. At present, education as conducted in our public-school
and university system appears to me to be neither utilitarian nor
intellectual. It aims at being intellectual first and utilitarian
afterwards, and it misses both.

Whether anything can be done on a big scale to help us out of the poor
tangle in which we are involved, I do not know. I fear not. I do not
think that the time is ripe. I do not believe that great movements can
be brought about by prophets, however enlightened their views, however
vigorous their personalities, unless there is a corresponding energy
below. An individual may initiate and control a great force of public
opinion; I do not think he can originate it. There is certainly a vague
and widespread discontent with our present results; but it is all a
negative opinion