lt that this line of teaching needed to be developed in a
school which had been formerly almost wholly classical. For
grammatical minutiae, for learning rules by heart, and indeed for the
old style of grammar-teaching generally, he had an unconcealed
contempt. He thought it unkind and wasteful to let a boy go on
puzzling over difficulties of language in an author, and permitted,
under restrictions, the use of English translations, or (as boys call
them) "cribs." Teaching was in his view a special gift of the
individual, which depended on the aptitude for getting hold of the
pupil's mind, and enlisting his interest in the subject. He had
accordingly no faith in the doctrine that teaching is a science which
can be systematically studied, or an art in which the apprentice ought
to be systematically trained. When he was summoned as a witness before
the Secondary Education Commission in 1894 he adhered, under
cross-examination, to this view (so far as it affected schools like
Harrow or Eton), refusing to be moved by the arguments of those among
the Commissioners who cited the practice of Germany, where Paedagogik,
as they call it, is elaborately taught in the universities. "I am
unable," he said, "to conceive any machinery by which the art of
teaching can be given practically to masters. That art is so much a
matter of personal power and experience, and of various social and
moral gifts, that I cannot conceive a good person made a good master
by merely seeing a class of boys taught, unless he was allowed to take
a real and serious part in it himself, unless he became a teacher
himself. I can understand that at a primary school you can learn by
going in and hearing a good teacher at work; but the teaching of a
class of older boys is so different, and has so much of the social
element in it, and it may vary so much, that I should despair of
teaching a young man how to take a class unless he was a long time
with me.... A master at a large public school is chiefly a moral and
social force; a master is this to a much less extent at a primary
school or in the ordinary day-schools, the grammar-schools of the
country. To deal with boys when you have them completely under your
control for the whole of every day is an altogether different thing,
and requires different virtues in the teacher from those that are
required in the case of day-schools."

Bowen may possibly have been mistaken, even as regards the teachers in
the great publi