hand, gathering facts. This sort of thing it is impossible to reduce to
method and system, and, consequently, it is the proper field for the
teacher's initiative. It is largely in order to leave time and energy
for this that I am anxious to reduce the more rigorous elements in
schooling to standard and text-book.

Now all this schooling need not take more than twenty hours a week for
its backbone or hard-work portion, its English, mathematics, science,
and exact drawing, and twelve hours a week for its easier, more
individual employments of sketching, painting, and reading, and this
leaves a large margin of time for military drill and for physical
exercises. If we are to get the best result from the child's
individuality, we must leave a large portion of that margin at the
child's own disposal, it must be free to go for walks, to "muck about,"
as schoolboys say, to play games, and (within limits) to consort with
companions of its own choosing--to follow its interests in short. It is
in this direction that British middle-class education fails most
signally at the present time. The English schoolboy and schoolgirl are
positively hunted through their days. They do not play--using the word
to indicate a spontaneous employment into which imagination enters--at
all. They have games, but they are so regulated that the imagination is
eliminated; they have exercises of various stereotyped sorts. They are
taken to and fro to these things in the care of persons one would call
ushers unhesitatingly were it not that they also pretended to teach.
The rest of their waking time is preparation or supervised reading or
walking under supervision. Their friendships are watched. They are
never, never left alone. The avowed ideal of many boarding
schoolmasters is to "send them to bed tired out." Largely this is due
to a natural dread of accidents and scrapes, that will make trouble for
the school, but there is also another cause. If I may speak frankly and