of science no one can doubt that under the present system of education a proportion of not unintelligent boys in practice have little option.  From earliest youth classics are offered to them as almost the sole vehicle of education.  They do sufficiently well in classics, as they probably would on any other curriculum, to justify themselves and their advisers in thinking that they have made a good beginning to which it is safer to stick.  The system has a huge momentum, and so, holding to the “great wheel” that goes up the hill, they let it draw them after.  In their protest against the monotony of the courses provided for young boys the reformers are right.  The trouble is not that science is not taught in the schools, but that in schools of the highest type, with certain exceptions, the young boys are not offered it.

Realising the determinism which modern biological knowledge has compelled us to accept, we suspect that the power of education to modify the destinies of individuals is relatively small.  Abrogating larger hopes we recognise education in its two scientific aspects, as a selective agency, but equally as a provision of opportunity.  In view therefore of the congenital diversity of the individual types, that provision should be as diverse and manifold as possible, and the very first essential in an adequate scheme of education is that to the minds of the young something of everything should be offered, some part of all the kinds of intellectual sustenance in which the minds of men have grown and rejoiced.  That should be the ideal.  Nothing of varied stimulus or attraction that can be offered should be withheld.  So only will the young mind discover its aptitudes and powers.  This ideal education should bring all into contact with beauty as seen first in literature, ancient and modern, with the great models of art and the patterns of nobility of thought and of conduct; and no less should it show to all the truth of the natural world, the changeless systems of the universe, as revealed in astronomy or in chemistry, something too of the truth about life, what we animals really are, what our place and what our powers, a truth ungarbled whether by prudery or mysticism.

But presented with this ideal the schoolmaster will reply that something of everything means nothing thorough.  I know the objection and what it commonly stands for.  It is the cloak and pretext for that accursed pedantry and cant which turns every sort of teaching to a blight.  Thoroughness is the excuse for giving boys grammar and accidence in the name of Greek:  diagrams, formulae and numerical examples in the name of science.  Stripped of disguise this love of thoroughness is nothing but an indolent resolve to make things easy for the teacher, and, worse still, for the examiner.  Live teaching is hard work.  It demands continual freshness and a mind alert.  The dullest man can hear irregular verbs, and with the book he knows whether