provided only for mental training. Their education was intended
for those who were to follow the professions or to become
scholars or gentlemen of leisure. Education was not intended to
prepare the great mass of men for the every-day work of life.

While only indirectly related to my subject, it is interesting
to recall that there was in this country in the early
nineteenth century much opposition to the establishment of
common schools for the masses. It was claimed that those who
belonged to the working classes did not need to be educated.
Our own colleges and universities were originally founded on
the old classical-ascetic model, so that the spirit of the
medieval period survived in the educational plan of this
country. It is only in recent decades that these institutions
have begun to depart from the older, formal, classical methods
that made education a privilege of the few, the average man
being deprived of the advantages of the training that he
needed. Because of this the humble millions of men and women
who wove and spun, and fed and housed the world were left out
of the educational scheme.

Some years ago a London weekly paper, which speaks for the
conservative class of England, in discussing certain suggested
innovations in English higher education, said that the great
merit of education at Oxford and Cambridge was that it was
"absolutely useless." By this it was probably meant that the
education was for a chosen few, was not intended to prepare men
for the practical work of life and was essentially and only an
intellectual and cultural training.