running the risk
of being misunderstood. The possible, as I conceive it, is no mere
"fabric of a dream." What are possibilities for the elementary
school, as such, are already actualities in certain schools. Were it
not so, I should not speak of them as possibilities. I do not pretend
to be a prophet, in the vulgar sense of the word. The ends which I am
about to set before managers and teachers are ends which have been
achieved, and are being achieved, _under entirely normal conditions_,
in various parts of the country, and which are therefore not
impracticable. There are many elementary schools in England in which
bold and successful departures have been made from the beaten track;
and in each of these cases what is at present a mere possibility for
most schools has been actually realised. And there is one elementary
school at least in which the beaten track has been entirely
abandoned, with the result that possibilities (as I may now call
them) which I might perhaps have dismissed on _a priori_ grounds as
too fantastic for serious consideration, have become part of the
everyday life of the scholars.
That school shall now become the theme of my book; for I feel that I
cannot serve the cause of education better than by trying to describe
and interpret the work that is being done in it. The school belongs
to a village which I will call Utopia. It is not an imaginary
village--a village of Nowhere--but a very real village, which can be
reached, as all other villages can, by rail and road. It nestles at
the foot of a long range of hills; and if you will climb the slope
that rises at the back of the village, and look over the level
country that you have left behind, you will see in the distance the
gleaming waters of one of the many seas that wash our shores. The
village is fairly large, as villages go in these days of rural
depopulation; and the school is attended by about 120 children. The
head teacher, whose genius has revolutionised the life, not of the
school only, but of the whole village, is a woman. I will call her
Egeria. She has certainly been my Egeria, in the sense that whatever
modicum of wisdom in matters educational I may happen to possess, I
owe in large measure to her. I have paid her school many visits, and
it has taken me many months of thought to get to what I believe to be
the bed-rock of her philosophy of education,--a philosophy which I
will now attempt to expound.
Two things will strike the stra
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