go.

It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end
them; the curriculum and the social organisation of the English
public school are the crowning instances of that. They go on
because they have begun. Schools are not only immortal institutions
but reproductive ones. Our founder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, I am
sure, of Gates' pedagogic values and would, I feel certain, have
dealt with them disrespectfully. But public schools and university
colleges sprang into existence correlated, the scholars went on to
the universities and came back to teach the schools, to teach as
they themselves had been taught, before they had ever made any real
use of the teaching; the crowd of boys herded together, a crowd
perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same, adjusted itself by
means of spontaneously developed institutions. In a century, by its
very success, this revolutionary innovation of Renascence public
schools had become an immense tradition woven closely into the
fabric of the national life. Intelligent and powerful people ceased
to talk Latin or read Greek, they had got what was wanted, but that
only left the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point. Since
most men of any importance or influence in the country had been
through the mill, it was naturally a little difficult to persuade
them that it was not quite the best and most ennobling mill the wit
of man could devise. And, moreover, they did not want their
children made strange to them. There was all the machinery and all
the men needed to teach the old subjects, and none to teach whatever
new the critic might propose. Such science instruction as my father
gave seemed indeed the uninviting alternative to the classical
grind. It was certainly an altogether inferior instrument at that
time.