But man cannot live for himself alone.  He is a corporate being; and, personality or no personality, he has to fit into a world of fellow-men with similar human claims.  The second charge against the German system is that it ignores the value of human fellowship.  It regards the citizens of a country as “useful and organisable subjects” rather than as fellow-members of a democracy, bound together by all the various social ties of comradeship and intercourse.

The Prussian system, with its elaborate control and direction from above, dislikes the free play of human groupings, and discourages all spontaneous or unauthorised associations.  Schoolboy “societies,” for instance, are in Germany an evil to be deplored and extirpated, not, as with us, a symptom of health and vigour, to be sympathetically watched and encouraged.  Instead, there is a direct inculcation of patriotism, a strenuous and methodical training of each unit for his place in the great State machine.  We do not so read human nature.  Our British tendency is to develop habits of service and responsibility through a devotion to smaller and more intimate associations, to build on a foundation of lesser loyalties and duties.  We do not conceive it to be the function of the school to teach patriotism or to teach fellowship.  Rather we hold that good education is fellowship, is citizenship, in the deepest meaning of those words; that to discover and to exercise the responsibilities of membership in a smaller body is the best training for a larger citizenship.  A school, a ship, a club, a Trade Union, any free association of Englishmen, is all England in miniature.  “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society,” said Burke long ago, “is the first principle, the germ, as it were, of public affections.  It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and mankind....  We begin our public affections in our families.  No cold relation is a zealous citizen.  We pass on to our neighbourhoods, to our habitual provincial connections.  These are inns and resting-places... so many images of the great country, in which the heart found something which it could fill."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Reflections on the French Revolution, pp. 292, 494 (of vol. iii. of Collected Works, ed. 1899).]

There is one fairly safe test for a system of education:  What do its victims think of it?  “In Prussia,” says Dr. Sadler, “a schoolboy seems to regard his school as he might regard a railway station—­a convenient and necessary establishment, generally ugly to look at, but also, for its purpose efficient.”  The illustration is an apt one:  for a Prussian school is too often, like a railway station, simply a point of departure, something to be got away from as soon as possible.  “In England a boy who is at a good secondary school cares for it as an officer cares for his regiment or as a sailor cares for his ship,” or, we may add, as a Boy Scout cares for his Troop.[1]