suggestive lectures at pedagogic conferences. If, indeed, such essays
and such lectures do any good at all. The more one looks into
scholastic affairs the more one is struck not only by the futility but
the positive mischievousness of much of what passes for educational
liberalism. The schoolmaster is criticised vehemently for teaching the
one or two poor useless subjects he can in a sort of way teach, and
practically nothing is done to help or equip him to teach anything
else. By reason of this uproar, the world is full now of anxious
muddled parents, their poor brains buzzing with echoes of Froebel,
Tolstoy, Herbert Spencer, Ruskin, Herbart, Colonel Parker, Mr. Harris,
Matthew Arnold, and the _Morning Post_, trying to find something
better. They know nothing of what is right, they only know very, very
clearly that the ordinary school is extremely wrong. They are quite
clear they don't want "cram" (though they haven't the remotest idea
what cram is), and they have a pretty general persuasion that failure
at examination is a good test of a sound education. And in response to
their bleating demand there grows a fine crop of Quack Schools; schools
organized on lines of fantastic extravagance, in which bee-keeping
takes the place of Latin, and gardening supersedes mathematics, in
which boys play tennis naked to be cured of False Shame, and the
numerical exercises called bookkeeping and commercial correspondence
are taught to the sons of parents (who can pay a hundred guineas a
year), as Commercial Science. The subjects of study in these schools
come and go like the ravings of a disordered mind; "Greek History" (in
an hour or so a week for a term) is followed by "Italian Literature,"
and this gives place to the production of a Shakesperian play that
ultimately overpowers and disorganizes the whole curriculum. Ethical
lessons and the school pulpit flourish, of course. A triennial walk to
a chalk-pit is Field Geology, and vague half-holiday wanderings are
Botany Rambles. "Art" of the copper punching variety replaces any