of power in the state. Pride and their many advantages--of which one is
quite conceivably an average essential superiority--will probably
ensure a satisfactory result from the Schooling process in the case of
a much greater proportion of better-class than of lower-class boys and
girls. [Footnote: In most big public schools, I am told, there is a
system of superannuation about sixteen, but I know nothing of the
provision for those who are weeded out.]

From the mass who show a satisfactory result at the end of the
Schooling process, the functional manhood and womanhood of our peoples
have to be developed, and we have now to discuss the nature of the
second phase of education, the phase that should be the mental parallel
and accompaniment of physical adolescence in all the citizens who are
to count for strength in the state. There is a break in the whole
development of the human being at this age, and it may very well be
paralleled by a break in methods and subjects of instruction. In Great
Britain, in the case of the wealthier classes, schooling and puerile
discipline is prolonged altogether too far, largely through the gross
incapacity of our secondary teachers. These men are unable, boring away
day after day, week after week, year after year, with vain repetitions,
imbecile breaks and new beginnings, through all the vast period from
eleven or twelve until twenty, to achieve that mastery of Latin and
Greek which was once the necessary preliminary to education, and which
has become at last, through the secular decline in scholastic energy
and capacity due to the withdrawal of interest in these studies, the
unattainable educational ideal. These classical pedagogues, however,
carry the thing up to three or four and twenty in the Universities--
though it is inconceivable that any language spoken since the
antediluvian age of leisure, can need more than ten years to learn--and
if they could keep the men until forty or fifty they would still be