and specially designed instruction, to give a boy or girl a definite
bias towards "truth," towards acts called "healthy" (a word it would
puzzle the ordinary schoolmaster or schoolmistress extremely to define,
glib as they are with it), towards honour, towards generosity,
enterprise, self-reliance, and the like. The masters in our public
schools are far from blameless in this respect, and you may gauge the
quality of many of these gentlemen pretty precisely by their
disposition towards the "school pulpit" line of business. Half an
hour's "straight talk to the boys," impromptu vague sentimentality
about Earnestness, Thoroughness, True Patriotism, and so forth, seems
to assuage the conscience as nothing else could do, for weeks of ill-
prepared, ill-planned teaching, and years of preoccupation with rowing-
boats and cricket. The more extreme examples of this type will say in a
tone of manly apology, "It does the boys good to tell them plainly what
I think about serious things"--when the simple fact of the case is too
often that he does all he can not to think about any things of any sort
whatever, except cricket and promotion. Schoolmistresses, again, will
sometimes come near boasting to the inquiring parent of our "ethical
hour," and if you probe the facts you will find that means no more and
no less than an hour of floundering egotism, in which a poor illogical
soul, with a sort of naive indecency, talks nonsense about "Ideals,"
about the Higher and the Better, about Purity, and about many secret
and sacred things, things upon which wise men are often profoundly
uncertain, to incredulous or imitative children. All that is needed to
do this sort of thing abundantly and freely is a certain degree of
aggressive egotism, a certain gift of stupidity, good intentions, and a
defective sense of educational possibilities and limitations.

In addition to moral discussions, that at the best are very second-rate
eloquence, and at the worst are respect destroying, mind destroying