ed to admit that they themselves could be
mistaken, there would be an end of all progress. Minds of the sturdy,
unconvinced order are generally found to range themselves on the side
of things as they are; and that is at all events a good guarantee that
things won't move too fast, and against the trying of rash experiments.

But I don't want to be rash; I think that for a great many boys our
type of education is a failure, and I want to see if something cannot
be devised to meet their needs. But my opponents won't admit any
failure. They say that the boys who, I think, end by being hopelessly
uneducated would be worse off if they had not been grounded in the
classics. They say that my theory is only to make things easier for
boys; and they add that, if any boy's education is an entire failure
(they admit a few incapables are to be found), it is the boy's own
fault; he has been idle and listless; if he had worked properly it
would have been all right; he would have been fortified; and anyhow,
they say, it doesn't matter what you teach such boys--they would have
been hopeless anyhow.

Of course the difficulty of proving my case is great. You can't, in
education, get two exactly parallel boys and try the effect of
different types of education on the two. A chemist can put exactly the
same quantity of some salt in two vessels, and, by treating them in
different ways, produce a demonstration which is irrefragable. But no
two boys are exactly alike, and, while classics are demanded at the
university, boys of ability will tend to keep on the classical side; so
that the admitted failure of modern sides in many places to produce
boys of high intellectual ability results from the fact that boys of
ability do not tend to join the modern sides.

So one hammers on, and, as it is always easier to leave an object at
rest than to set it moving, we remain very much where we were.

The cynical solution is to say, let us have peace at any cost; let the
thing alone; let us teach what we have to teach, and not bother about
results. But that appears to me to be a cowardly attitude. If one
expresses dissatisfaction to one of the cheerful stationary party, they
reply, "Oh, take our word for it, it is all right; do your best; you
don't teach at all badly, though you lack conviction; leave it to us,
and never mind the discontent expressed by parents, and the cynical
contempt felt by boys for intellectual things."

"Meanwhile, regardles