take his place in the community, what did it teach him? How did it
ennoble him? The compendiums, one and all, were written under the
control of the upper classes, for the sole purpose of forcing the
lower classes to look up to their betters. The schoolmasters
frequently reproached their pupils with ingratitude and impressed on
them their utter inability to realise, even faintly, the advantage
they enjoyed in receiving an education which so many of their poorer
fellow-creatures would always lack. No, indeed, the boys were not
sophisticated enough to see through the gigantic fraud and its
advantages.

But did they ever find true joy, real pleasure in the subjects of
their studies for their own sakes? Never! Therefore the teachers had
to appeal incessantly to the lower passions of their pupils, to
ambition, self-interest, material advantages.

What a miserable make-believe school was! Not one of the boys believed
that he would reap any benefit from repeating the names and dates of
hated kings in their proper sequence, from learning dead languages,
proving axioms, defining "a matter of course," and counting the anthers
of plants and the joints on the hindlegs of insects, to knowing the end
no more about them than their Latin names. How many long hours were
wasted in the vain attempt to divide an angle into three equal sections,
a thing which can be done so easily in a minute in an _unscientific_
(that is to say practical) way by using a graduator.

How they scorned everything practical! His sisters, who were taught
French from Ollendorf's grammar, were able to speak the language after
two years' study; but the college boys could not say a single sentence
after six. Ollendorf was a name which they pronounced with pity and