m look outward? But if the Fates are against
his looking inward, to what purpose has he been emancipated from the
direct control of a system which had at least the merit of being in
line with all the central tendencies of Western civilisation? How
does it profit him to be free if, under the pressure of those
tendencies, the chief use that he makes of his freedom is to grind
out from his pupils results akin to those which were asked for in the
days of schedules and percentages? Freedom was given him in order
that he might be free to take thought for the vital welfare of his
pupils. Or, if freedom was not given to him for that purpose, it were
better that it had been withheld from him until those who were able
to give or withhold it had formed a juster conception of its meaning.

The truth is that the exemption of the elementary school, and of it
alone among schools, from the direct pressure of the examination
system, is an isolated and audacious experiment, which is carried on
under conditions so unfavourable to its success that nothing but a
high degree of intelligence and moral courage (not to speak of
originality) on the part of the teacher can make it succeed. Can we
wonder that in many cases the experiment has proved a failure?

At the end of the previous chapter I asked myself whether the
education that was given in the ordinary elementary school tended to
foster self-expression on the part of the child. We can now see what
the answer to this question is likely to be. For a third of a
century--from 1862 to 1895--self-expression on the part of the child
may be said to have been formally prohibited by all who were
responsible for the elementary education of the children of England,
and also to have been prohibited _de facto_ by all the unformulated
conditions under which the elementary school was conducted. In 1895
the formal prohibition of self-expression ceased, but the _de facto_
prohibition of it in the ordinary school is scarcely less effective
to-day than it was in the darkest days of the old _regime_. For

"The evil that men do lives after them,"

and the old _regime_, though nominally abrogated, overshadows us
still. When I say this I do not merely mean that many teachers who
were brought up under the old _regime_ have been unable to emancipate
themselves from its influence. I mean that the old _regime_ was
itself the outcome and expression of traditional tendencies which
are of the essence of Western c