The importance of a good curriculum is often exaggerated.  But a bad selection of subjects, and a bad method of teaching them, may condemn even the best teacher to ineffectiveness.  Nothing, for example, can well be more unintelligent than the manner of teaching the classics in our public schools.  The portions of Greek and Latin authors construed during a lesson are so short that the boys can get no idea of the book as a whole; long before they finish it they are moved up into another form.  And over all the teaching hangs the menace of the impending examination, the riddling Sphinx which, as Seeley said in a telling quotation from Sophocles, forces us to attend to what is at our feet, neglecting all else—­all the imponderables in which the true value of education consists.  The tyranny of examinations has an important influence upon the choice of subjects as well as upon the manner of teaching them; for some subjects, which are remarkably stimulating to the mind of the pupil, are neglected, because they are not well adapted for examinations.  Among these, unfortunately, are our own literature and language.

It is therefore necessary, even in a short essay which professes to deal only with generalities, to make some suggestions as to the main subjects which our education should include.  As has been indicated already, I would divide them into main classes—­science and humanism.  Every boy should be instructed in both branches up to a certain point.  We must firmly resist those who wish to make education purely scientific, those who, in Bacon’s words, “call upon men to sell their books and build furnaces, quitting and forsaking Minerva and the Muses and relying upon Vulcan.”  We want no young specialists of twelve years old; and a youth without a tincture of humanism can never become

  A man foursquare, withouten flaw ywrought.

Of the teaching of science I am not competent to speak.  But as an instrument of mind-training, and even of liberal education, it seems to me to have a far higher value than is usually conceded to it by humanists.  To direct the imagination to the infinitely great and the infinitely small, to vistas of time in which a thousand years are as one day; to the tremendous forces imprisoned in minute particles of matter; to the amazing complexity of the mechanism by which the organs of the human body perform their work; to analyse the light which has travelled for centuries from some distant star; to retrace the history of the earth and the evolution of its inhabitants—­such studies cannot fail to elevate the mind, and only prejudice will disparage them.  They promote also a fine respect for truth and fact, for order and outline, as the Greeks said, with a wholesome dislike of sophistry and rhetoric.  The air which blows about scientific studies is like the air of a mountain top—­thin, but pure and bracing.  And as a subject of education science has a further advantage which can hardly be overestimated.  It is in science that most of the new discoveries are being made.  “The rapture of the forward view” belongs to science more than to any other study.  We may take it as a well-established principle in education that the most advanced teachers should be researchers and discoverers as well as lecturers, and that the rank and file should be learners as well as instructors.  There is no subject in which this ideal is so nearly attainable as in science.