s probably due to the strongly Judaistic tone of our so-called
Christianity. At any rate, far too many schoolmasters suffer from
conscientious scruples about allowing the spirits of freedom,
initiative, curiosity, enjoyment, to blow through their class-rooms.

There has been, always to some extent, but with gathering force in
recent years, a natural revolt against this mixture of puritanism,
scholasticism, and dilettantism, which made the intellectual side of
public school education such a failure except for the few who were
born with the spoon of scholarship in their mouths. The irruption of
that turbulent rascal, natural science, has perhaps had most to do
with humanising our humanistic studies. It was a great step when boys
who could not make verses were allowed to make if it was but a smell;
and even breaking a test-tube once in a while is more educative than
breaking the gender-rules every day of the week. Many of my friends,
who label themselves humanists, are in a panic about this, and look
upon me sadly as a renegade because I, who owe almost everything to a
"classical education," am ready (they think) to sell the pass of
"compulsory Greek" to a horde of money-grubbing barbarians who will
turn our flowery groves of Academe into mere factories of commercial
efficiency. But fear is a treacherous guide. They are the victims of
that abstract generalisation of which I spoke at the outset. I check
their forebodings by reference to concrete personalities, myself, my
children, and the hundreds of boys I have known. And I see more and
more plainly, as I study the infinite variety of our mental lineaments
and the common stock of human nature and civilised society which
unites us, that literature is a permanent and indispensable and even
inevitable element in our education; and that moreover it can only
have free scope and growth in the expanding personality of the young
in a due and therefore a varying harmony with other interests. I and
my children and my schoolboys have eyes and ears and hands--and even
legs! We have, as Aristotle rightly saw, an appetite for knowledge,
and that appetite cannot be satisfied, though it may be choked, by a
sole diet of literature. We have desires of many kinds demanding
satisfaction and requiring government. We have a sense of duty and
vocation: we know that we and our families must eat to live and to
carry on the race. We resent, in our inarticulate way, these sneers at
our Philistinism,