IX

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION


When we digressed to the general question of the political, social, and
moral atmosphere in which the English-speaking citizen develops, we
left the formal education of the average child, whose development
threads through these papers and holds them together, at about the age
of fifteen and at the end of the process of Schooling. We have now to
carry on that development to adult citizenship. It is integral in the
New Republican idea that the process of Schooling, which is the common
atrium to all public service, should be fairly uniform throughout the
social body, that although the average upper-class child may have all
the advantages his conceivably better mental inheritance, his better
home conditions, and his better paid and less overworked teachers may
give him, there shall be no disadvantages imposed upon the child of any
class, there shall be no burking of the intellectual education for any
purpose whatever. To keep poor wretches in serfdom on the land by
depriving them of all but the most rudimentary literary education, as a
very considerable element in the new Nature Study Movement certainly
intends, is altogether antagonistic to New Republican ideas, and there
must be no weeding out of capable and high-minded teachers by filtering
them through grotesque and dishonouring religious tests--dishonouring
because compulsory, whatever the real faith of the teacher may be. And
at the end of the Schooling period there must begin a process of
sorting in the mass of the national youth--as far as possible,
regardless of their social origins--that will go on throughout life.
For the competition of public service must constitute the Battle for