“It is now understood that every subject is valuable, if it is properly taught; it will perform that which, as follows from the accounts given above of the aim of education, is the work most important in the case of boys—­that is, it will draw out their faculties and make them useful in the world, alert, trained in industry, and able to understand, so far as their school lessons educated them, and make themselves master of any subject set before them.”

This quotation is conclusive.

Sec. 3

I am haunted by a fear that the careless reader will think I am writing against upper-class schoolmasters.  I am, it is undeniable, writing against their dullness, but it is, I hold, a dullness that is imposed upon them by the conditions under which they live.  Indeed, I believe, could I put the thing directly to the profession—­“Do you not yourselves feel needlessly limited and dull?”—­should receive a majority of affirmative responses.  We have, as a nation, a certain ideal of what a schoolmaster must be; to that he must by art or nature approximate, and there is no help for it but to alter our ideal.  Nothing else of any wide value can be done until that is done.

In the first place, the received ideal omits a most necessary condition.  We do not insist upon a headmaster or indeed any of our academic leaders and dignitaries, being a man of marked intellectual character, a man of intellectual distinction.  It is assumed, rather lightly in many cases, that he has done “good work,” as they say—­the sort of good work that is usually no good at all, that increases nothing, changes nothing, stimulates no one, leads no whither.  That, surely, must be altered.  We must see to it that our leading schoolmasters at any rate must be men of insight and creative intelligence, men who could at a pinch write a good novel or produce illuminating criticism or take an original part in theological or philosophical discussion, or do any of these minor things.  They must be authentic men, taking a line of their own and capable of intellectual passion.  They should be able to make their mark outside the school, if only to show they carry a living soul into it.  As things are, nothing is so fatal to a schoolmaster’s career as to do that.

And closely related to this omission is our extreme insistence upon what we call high moral character, meaning, really, something very like an entire absence of moral character.  We insist upon tact, conformity, and an unblemished record.  Now, in these days, of warring opinion, these days of gigantic, strange issues that cannot possibly be expressed in the formulae of the smaller times that have gone before, tact is evasion, conformity formality, and silence an unblemished record, mere evidence of the damning burial of a talent of life.  The sort of man into whose hands we give our sons’ minds must never have experimented morally or thought at all freely or vigorously about,