researches which would justify us in coming to original conclusions
about them. I know the mass of scientific opinion has always gone the
other way; but then scientific opinion means only the opinion of men of
science, who are themselves specialists, and who think most of the
education needed to make men specialists, not of the education needed to
fit them for the general exigencies and emergencies of life. We don't
want authorities on the Cucurbitaceæ, but well-informed citizens.
Professor Huxley is not our best guide in these matters, but Mr. Herbert
Spencer, who long ago, in his book on Education, sketched out a radical
programme of instruction in that knowledge which is of most worth, such
as no country, no college, no school in Europe has ever yet been bold
enough to put into practice.

What common sense really demands, then, is education in the main results
of all the sciences--a knowledge of what is known, not necessarily a
knowledge of each successive step by which men came to know it. At
present, of course, in all our schools in England there is no systematic
teaching of knowledge at all; what replaces it is a teaching of the
facts of language, and for the most part of useless facts, or even of
exploded fictions. Our public schools, especially (by which phrase we
never mean real public schools like the board schools at all, but merely
schools for the upper and the middle classes) are in their existing
stage primarily great gymnasiums--very good things, too, in their way,
against which I have not a word of blame; and, secondarily, places for
imparting a sham and imperfect knowledge of some few philological facts
about two extinct languages. Pupils get a smattering of Homer and
Cicero. That is literally all the equipment for life that the cleverest
and most industrious boys can ever take away from them. The sillier or
idler don't take away even that. As to the "mental training" argument,
so often trotted out, it is childish enough not to be worth answering.