civilized ideas is, for the English-speaking world to-day, English--not
the weak, spoken dialect of each class and locality, but the rich and
splendid language in which and with which our literature and philosophy
grow. That, however, is by the way. Our point at present is that the
exhaustive teaching of a language so that it may serve as a key to
culture is a second function in the school.

We find in a broad survey of schools in general that there has also
been a disposition to develop a special training in thought and
expression either in the mother tongue (as in the Roman schools of
Latin oratory), or in the culture tongue (as in Roman schools of Greek
oratory), and we find the same element in the mediaeval trivium.
Quintilian's conception of education, the reader will remember, was
oratory. This aspect of school work was the traditional and logical
development of the culture language-teaching. But as in Europe the
culture language has ceased to be really a culture language but merely
a reasonless survival, and its teaching has degenerated more and more
into elaborate formalities supposed to have in some mystical way "high
educational value," and for the most part conducted by men unable
either to write or speak the culture language with any freedom or
vigour, this crown of cultivated expression has become more and more
inaccessible. It is too manifestly stupid--even for our public
schoolmasters--to think of carrying the "classical grind" to that
pitch, and, in fact, they carry no part of the education to that pitch.
There is no deliberate and professed training at all in logical
thought--except for the use of Euclid's Elements to that end--nor in
expression in any language at all, in the great mass of modern schools.
This is a very notable point about the schools of the present period.

But, on the other hand, the schools of the modern period have developed