Department, the operations of which threw a web of education, intermediate between primary and university education, all over Britain.  A number of the teachers under that department were trained by him, and as examiner to the department he took the greatest care to reduce to a minimum the evils necessarily attendant on the mode of payment by results.  A certain number of teachers made it their chief effort to secure the largest possible number of grants.  Huxley regarded these as poachers of the worst kind, and did all he could to foil them.  He did all he could to promote systematic practical instruction in the classes, and to aid teachers who desired to learn their business more thoroughly.  He insisted again and again upon the popular nature of the classes; their great advantage was that they were accessible to all who chose to avail themselves of them after working hours, and that they brought the means of instruction to the doors of the factories and workshops.  The subjects which he considered of most importance were foreign languages, drawing, and elementary sciences, and he wished them to be used first of all by those who were handicraftsmen and who therefore left the elementary schools at the age of thirteen or fourteen.

In a lecture given at the formal opening of the Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore in 1876, and in a Rectorial address to the University of Aberdeen two years earlier, Huxley laid down the general lines of university education as he conceived it.  He began by supposing that a good primary education had already been received.

“Such an education should enable an average boy of fifteen or sixteen to read and write his own language with ease and accuracy, and with a sense of literary excellence derived from the study of our classic writers; to have a general acquaintance with the history of his own country and with the great laws of social existence; to have acquired the rudiments of the physical and psychological sciences, and a fair knowledge of elementary arithmetic and geometry.  He should have obtained an acquaintance with logic rather by example than by precept; while the acquirement of the elements of music and drawing should have been a pleasure rather than work.”

He had not much to say for secondary or intermediate education, partly because at that time, in England at least, the secondary schools were in a hopeless state of incapacity, and differed from primary schools not only in their greater expense, their adaptation to the class-spirit which demanded the separation of the boys of the upper and middle classes from those in the lower ranks of society, but chiefly in the futility of the education given at the majority of them.  But where intermediate schools did exist, he demanded that they should keep on the same wide track of general knowledge, not sacrificing one branch of knowledge for another.  He held that the elementary instruction to which he had referred embraced all the real kinds of knowledge and mental activity possible to man.  The university could add no new fields of mental activity, no new departments of knowledge.  What it could do was to intensify and specialise the instruction in each department.