School, at Carlisle Grammar School, in this direction--I daresay
it is done elsewhere, but I have seen the work of these three schools
with my own eyes--show what quite average boys are capable of in both
English poetry and English prose.

One of the best points of such a system of literary composition is
that even if slower boys cannot effect much, it gives a most wholesome
opening to the creative faculties of boys, whose minds, if stifled and
compressed, are most likely to work in unwholesome and tormenting
directions.

My suggestion then becomes part of a larger plea, the plea for more
direct cultivation of enjoyment in education. Some of our worst
mistakes in education arise from our not basing it upon the actual
needs and faculties of human nature, but upon the supposed
constitution of a child constructed by the starved imagination of
pedants and moralists and practical men.

One of the first requisites in cultivating intellectual and artistic
pleasure is to build up taste out of the actual perceptions of the
child. That is a factor which has been most stubbornly and
unintelligently disregarded in education. Developments in character
are of the nature of living things; they cannot be superimposed they
must be rooted in the temperament and they must draw nurture and
sustenance out of the spirit, as the seed imbibes its substance from
the unseen soil and the hidden waters. But what has been constantly
done is to introduce the broadest effects and the simplest romance,
directly and suddenly to the biggest masterpieces. The absence of all
gradation and reconciliation has been characteristic of our literary
education. Of course there is an initial difficulty in the case of the
classics, that there is very little in either Greek or Latin which
really appeals to an immature taste at all; and such books as might
appeal to inquisitive and inexperienced minds, such as Homer or the
_Anabasis_ of Xenophon, are made unattractive by the method of giving
such short snippets, and insisting on what used to be called thorough
parsing. Even _Alice in Wonderland_, let me say, could only prove a
drearily bewildering book, if read at the rate of twenty lines a
lesson, and if the principal tenses of all the verbs had to be
repeated correctly. It is absolutely essential, if any love of
literature is to be superinduced, that something should be read fast
enough to give some sense of continuity and range and horizon. The
practice of dic