when
they grow up, they will have to earn their daily bread. This theory
need not be seriously considered, for its inherent absurdity has
caused it to be tacitly abandoned by all whose opinion carries
weight; and the more reasonable theory that the education given in
the elementary school should be as far as possible adapted to the
environment of the school--that it should be given a rural bias, for
example, or a marine bias, or even an urban bias--has begun to take
its place. That it should ever have found advocates is interesting as
showing how easy it is for unenlightened public opinion to
misinterpret the word "useful."[23]

There is a third class of critics, composed for the most part of
members of Local Education Committees, who seem to think that ability
to pass a "leaving" examination is the only valid proof of the
usefulness of elementary education. If these influential critics, who
are showing in various ways that they care more for machinery than
for life, could have their will, they would probably revert to the
"good old days" of cut-and-dried syllabuses, formal examinations of
individual scholars, percentages of passes, and the like. As I have
already taken pains to explain what the _regime_ of the "good old
days" really meant, I need not waste my time in exposing the
fallacies which underlie this conception of "usefulness."

Here, then, are three distinct standards of usefulness in elementary
education. According to the first, education is useful in proportion
as it tends, by repressing the activities and atrophying the
faculties of the scholars, to keep the "lower orders" in their
places, and in so doing to provide the "upper classes" with a
sufficiency of labourers and servants. According to the second, it is
useful in proportion as it is able to prepare the scholars for their
various callings in after life.[24] According to the third, in
proportion as it enables the scholars to pass with credit certain
"leaving" and other examinations of a formal type.

I will now assume that the end of education is to produce, or at any
rate contribute to the production of, good men and women; and that
the education given in elementary schools is useful in exact
proportion as it serves this end. I am not using the word "good" in
its Sunday School sense. Nor does the word suggest to my mind that
blend of stupidity, patience, and submissiveness which sometimes
passes for "goodness" when the "upper classes" are taking