ected to a certain amount of repressive discipline,
and compelled to go to church or chapel. If, after having passed
through this mill, the children of the "lower orders" do not develop
into good men and women and useful citizens, it is not their
education which is to blame, but the inborn sinfulness of their
corrupt and fallen natures. Such an education is regarded by those
who advocate it as pre-eminently _useful_. There is no nonsense about
it, no cant of idealism, no taint of socialism. It keeps the "lower
orders" in their places, and forbids them to dream of rising above
"that state of life unto which it" has pleased "God to call them." As
it is a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the conventional type of education,
my objection to it is that it makes the best possible provision for
securing the end which the conventional type seems to have set
before itself,--in other words, for depressing the vitality of the
child, for starving his faculties, for arresting his growth. As
such, it has not even the merit of being sordidly useful; for
unless stupidity is a better thing than intelligence, slowness than
alertness, helplessness than initiative, lifelessness than vital
activity, the child who has passed through that dreary mill will be
far less effective, even as a day-labourer, than the child whose
school-life has been one of continuous and many-sided growth. It is
strange that the reactionary members of the "upper classes" should be
too short-sighted to discern this obvious truth. But perhaps they
have a secret conviction that by so educating the "lower orders" as
to make them slow and stupid, helpless and lifeless, they will be the
better able to keep them in a state of subservience to and dependence
on themselves.[22] If this is so, there is method in the madness of
the "upper classes"; and their conception of the course that
education ought to take has the merit of being entirely true to their
basely selfish conception of the end that education ought to serve.

I have alluded to this pseudo-utilitarian theory, not because it is
intrinsically worthy of serious attention, but because there is
undoubtedly a strong and influential current of opinion which sets in
its direction. There are other advocates of a "useful" education who
seem to regard the elementary school, not as a training ground for
good men and women, but as a kind of technical institute in which the
children are to be trained for the various callings by which,