Some of our critics speak as if a boy came into a schoolmaster's hands as steel comes into the hands of a machine-tool maker, ready, without further preparation, to be manufactured, and then let loose complete on the world. They forget that a boy of fourteen is raw material, and must undergo many processes before he is fit to take his final shape. No one would propose to make high pressure steel out of the crude ore as it leaves the mine; if he got any resulting metal from such an attempt, it would be coarse and brittle. But an attempt to run human raw material into its final mould before it has been refined and tempered will produce something equally unserviceable. The crude ore comes to the schoolmaster wanting in bite and cutting power, unable to stand a sudden strain; his essential business is to turn the rude metal into high pressure steel, and on the success of the endeavour will depend, other things being equal, its serviceableness and effect in after-life. The knowledge may be picked up later, but the training of the mind never. Hence so much that seems needless and annoying in education. It must impart qualities and powers essential if its product is to be useful, but of which that product has, as yet, hardly a trace. Accuracy, concentration, sym

pathy, judgment are obvious needs, but not less necessary is the revelation of the world itself. Education, it has been said, should knock windows into the world for us. We are born into a closed and darkened room: as the windows are opened, we see, here, man, with all his character and capacities, experiments, endless achievements and possibilities; there, the material world itself, the elements that compose, and unexpected laws that govern it. The windows are unmade, or in the making, when we are fourteen; we have no notion of the landscapes and moving figures outside our prison-house, and an essential of education is to make openings in its walls, and take us to them, and give us time to view the scene beyond.

That explains why the school time-tables are not filled with colloquial French or book-keeping. Taking a wider view of what is necessary to success in life to put the lowest motive-education remembers that the power to understand other points of view, to 'know when a thing is proved and when it is not,' to realise the various possibilities, material and human, of the universe, is even more necessary to the business man than a knowledge of French or commercial geography.

An open and alert mind, which understands |

human nature and its possibilities, which can judge and sympathise, which because of its wide survey and outlook on the world creates new opportunities and developments, prospers in commerce or in any work; but it is the child of a varied education, not of narrow technical training. So education, remembering this, says to the complaining parent: Your boy will get his commercial and professional knowledge; but it is my first task to give him a general training, to open windows on the world, and thus give him a glimpse of its possibilities, and a sense of proportion. Commerce will not flourish the better if I send into it men of narrow outlook and untrained minds; and in the end, my method will pay you, even in mere coin of the realm.

If a College tutor, with no special knowledge of commerce, were to expound his ideas on running a big business, his shots would go wide; amateur suggestions on education are apt to be equally ill aimed. Education is a profession which requires at least as much thought and experience as any branch of commerce; and it would be unfair to use such views as men of straw, convenient and easy to demolish. Instead, let me take the case against literature, as it might be put by a man of

science, who was extreme in his views, but prudent and capable in expressing them. He would condemn the notion of giving the first place in education to literature, history and philosophy (as do our older universities). "It is a first necessity," he would argue, "for us, as a people, to comprehend the paramount part which science must occupy in genuine education if Great Britain is to maintain her position in the world. This position actually depends not on military power, important as this may be for the defence of the country, but upon the fact that we are, after all, as Adam Smith reminded us, a nation of shopkeepers, and that the goods we have to dispose of are no longer made by rule of thumb, but by the application of physical and chemical principles to the processes employed in their production. It is therefore obviously desirable that a knowledge of those principles should be diffused throughout the community." Even for boys who are not going into business the same is true. 'Do you really maintain,' we are asked, 'that the dead world should be studied before boys know the living world around them? Literature and philosophy are luxuries, but for the hard, practical business of life, a man

1

1 Sir E. Schäfer, Times Educational Supplement, March 7, 1916.

must understand the things among which he moves every day. Is he to remain ignorant of the nature and history of the soil on which he lives and from which his wealth comes; or of his body, of the laws which govern its health, of the methods in which its food is digested, or in which its nerves, flesh and bones are compacted; of the principles of mechanics which not merely control the great mechanical inventions that feed, clothe and transport him, but without which he would be actually unable to move his limbs? He must spend all his life in the presence of these realities; in his education alone shall he walk in the shadow world of literature? Science covers the greater part of life, let it cover the greater part of education also.' "What is actually wanted is that instruction in science shall form the basis of secondary education, and shall even share with the three R's the time allotted to elementary instruction." That, I hope, is not an unfair statement of the extreme scientific case; some of it is taken from a letter by a well-known man of science.

Now let us examine it a little closer. It is true that without physical science our whole civilisation would collapse; and it is a just conclusion from 1 Sir E. Schäfer, .c.