pretends merely to be a teaching of useful knowledge; the vistas, the
tremendous implications of modern science are conscientiously
disregarded, and it is in effect too often no more than a diversion of
school energies to the acquisition of imperfectly analyzed
misstatements about entrails, elements, and electricity, with a view--a
quite unjustifiable view--to immediate profitable hygienic and
commercial application. Whether there is any educational value in the
school-teaching of science we may discuss later. For the present we may
note it simply as a revived and developing element.

On the other hand, while these things expand in the modern school,
there are declining elements, once in older schemes of scholastic work
much more evident. In the culture of the mediaeval knight, for example,
and of the eighteenth-century young lady, elegant accomplishments,
taught disconnected from the general educational scheme and for
themselves, played a large part. The eighteenth-century young lady was
taught dancing, deportment, several instruments of music, how to
pretend to sketch, how to pretend to know Italian, and so on. The
dancing still survives--a comical mitigation of high school
austerities--and there is also a considerable interruption of school
work achieved by the music-master. If there is one thing that I would
say with certainty has no business whatever in schools, it is piano-
teaching. The elementary justification of the school is its
organization for class-teaching and work in unison, and there is
probably no subject of instruction that requires individual tuition
quite so imperatively as piano-playing; there is no subject so
disadvantageously introduced where children are gathered together. But
to every preparatory and girls' school in England--I do not know if the
same thing happens in America--the music-master comes once or twice a
week, and with a fine disregard of the elementary necessities of