“If Youth but Knew” is the title of a book published some years ago, but still with a quite living interest, by “Kappa”; it is the bitter complaint of a distressed senior against our educational system.  He is hugely disappointed in the public-school boy, and more particularly in one typical specimen.  He is—­if one might hazard a guess—­an uncle bereft of great expectations.  He finds an echo in thousands of other distressed uncles and parents.  They use the most divergent and inadequate forms of expression for this vague sense that the result has not come out good enough; they put it contradictorily and often wrongly, but the sense is widespread and real and justifiable and we owe a great debt to “Kappa” for an accurate diagnosis of what in the aggregate amounts to a grave national and social evil.

The trouble with “Kappa’s” particular public-school boy is his unlit imagination, the apathetic commonness of his attitude to life at large.  He is almost stupidly not interested in the mysteries of material fact, nor in the riddles and great dramatic movements of history, indifferent to any form of beauty, and pedantically devoted to the pettiness of games and clothing and social conduct.  It is, in fact, chiefly by his style in these latter things, his extensive unilluminated knowledge of Greek and Latin, and his greater costliness, that he differs from a young carpenter or clerk.  A young carpenter or clerk of the same temperament would have no narrower prejudices nor outlook, no less capacity for the discussion of broad questions and for imaginative thinking.  And it has come to the mind of “Kappa” as a discovery, as an exceedingly remarkable and moving thing, a thing to cry aloud about, that this should be so, that this is all that the best possible modern education has achieved.  He makes it more than a personal issue.  He has come to the conclusion that this is not an exceptional case at all, but a fair sample of what our upper-class education does for the imagination of those who must presently take the lead among us.  He declares plainly that we are raising a generation of rulers and of those with whom the duty of initiative should chiefly reside, who have minds atrophied by dull studies and deadening suggestions, and he thinks that this is a matter of the gravest concern for the future of this land and Empire.  It is difficult to avoid agreeing with him either in his observation or in his conclusion.  Anyone who has seen much of undergraduates, or medical students, or Army candidates, and also of their social subordinates, must be disposed to agree that the difference between the two classes is mainly in unimportant things—­in polish, in manner, in superficialities of accent and vocabulary and social habit—­and that their minds, in range and power, are very much on a level.  With an invincibly aristocratic tradition we are failing altogether to produce a leader class adequate to modern needs.  The State is light-headed.