between them.


C--THE CITIZEN IN PROCESS OF DEVELOPMENT

Leaving now the external survey of the city by help of its material
framework, its characteristic buildings and predominant styles, for the
deeper psychological survey of the citizens themselves, we may
conveniently begin with these also in their process of development--in
fact, our method compels us to this course. We enter then a school; and
if we bring fresh eyes we may soon be agreed that the extraordinary
babel of studies its time-table and curriculum reveal, is intelligible
from no single one of the various [Page: 112] geographic or historic
points of view we have traversed from mountain to sea, or from past to
present. But this unprecedented conflict of studies becomes at once
intelligible when viewed apart from any and every definite theory of
education yet promulgated by educationists, and even acquires a fresh
theory of its own--that of the attempted recapitulation of the survivals
of each and all preceding periods in their practical or speculative
aspects, particularly the later legends and literatures, their rituals
and codes. Thus, the inordinate specialisation upon arithmetic, the
exaggeration of all three R's, is plainly the survival of the demand for
cheap yet efficient clerks, characteristic of the recent and
contemporary financial period.

The ritual of examinations with its correlation of memorising and
muscular drill is similarly a development of the imperial order,
historically borrowed from the Napoleonic one; the chaotic "general
knowledge" is similarly a survival of the encyclopædic period; that is,
of the French Revolution and the Liberal Movement generally; the Latin