unaffected by the various judgments
that may be formed either of his critical or of his practical wisdom.

The lack then of a due balance of qualities and acquirements in so
many authors, and we may add other artists, is a cause, but no
justification, of that belittlement and even distrust of the literary
side of education which are on the whole marked features of the
English attitude to-day. But a more potent cause and a real
justification of this attitude is the neglect of due balance of
qualities and acquirements by so many educators and educational
systems. Great educators have themselves rarely been narrow-minded
men; but the traditions they have founded have gone the way of all
traditions.

What begins as an inspiration hardens into a formula. The ideals of
the Renascence were caricatured in their offspring of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Not only did the evolution of modern life
with its cities, its printing press, its gunpowder, its steam engine
and the rest, destroy the need of the well-to-do to be trained in the
practical arts of chivalry, of the chase, of husbandry, even of music
and design, so that the bodily activities of boys became relegated to
the sphere of mere games and pastimes; but as books usurped more and
more of the hours of boyhood, so the instructors of youth fell more
and more into the fatally easy path of formal and grammatical
treatment. The subject-matter of education was indeed literature, and
the very noblest literatures, mainly those of Greece and Rome: but
there was little of literary or humane interest about the study of it;
its meaning and spirit were concealed from all but the few who could
surmount the fences of linguistic pedantry and artificial technique
with which it was surrounded.

I do not know when the expression "the dead languages" was invented:
but certainly Latin and Greek have been treated as very dead languages
by the great majority of teachers for a very long time. And as "modern
subjects," history, geography, modern languages and literatures,
gradually thrust their way into the curriculum, each was subjected as
far as possible to the same mummification. There is a theory still
widely held among teachers that the value of a subject or of a method
of instruction depends upon the amount of drudgery which it involves
or the degree of repulsion which it excites. The theory rests upon a
confusion between the ideas of discipline and punishment, which itself
i