school between his fourth and fourteenth years were of
course in themselves insufficient for the needs of a grown man, and it
would be unfair to criticize his schooling from that standpoint. Its
defect was that it failed to initiate him into the inner significance of
information in general, and failed wholly to start him on the path of
learning. It was sterile of results. It opened to him no view, no vista;
set up in his brain no stir of activity such as could continue after he
had left school; and this for the reason that those simple items of
knowledge which it conveyed to him were too scrappy and too few to begin
running together into any understanding of the larger aspects of life. A
few rules of arithmetic, a little of the geography of the British
Islands, a selection of anecdotes from the annals of the ancient Jews;
no English history, no fairy-tales or romance, no inkling of the
infinities of time and space, or of the riches of human thought; but
merely a few "pieces" of poetry, and a few haphazard and detached
observations (called "Nature Study" nowadays) about familiar
things--"the cat," "the cow," "the parsnip," "the rainbow," and so
forth--this was the jumble of stuff offered to the child's mind--a
jumble to which it would puzzle a philosopher to give coherence. And
what could a child get from it to kindle his enthusiasm for that
civilized learning in which, none the less, it all may have its place?
When the boy left school his "education" had but barely begun.

And hardly anything has happened since then to carry it farther,
although once there seemed just a chance of something better. During two
successive winters the lad, being then from sixteen to seventeen years
old, went to a night-school, which was opened for twenty-six weeks in
each "session," and for four hours in each week. But the hope proved
fallacious. In those hundred and four hours a year--hours which came
after a tiring day's work--his brain was fed upon "mensuration" and "the
science of horticulture," the former on the chance that some day he
might want to measure a wall for paper-hanging or do some other job of
the sort, and the latter in case fate should have marked him out for a
nursery-gardener, when it would be handy to know that germinating seeds
begin by pushing down a root and pushing up a leaf or two. This gives a
notion of the sort of idea the luckless fellow derived from the
night-school. I do not think that the joinery-classes at