The pity of it is that the machinery was all there; cheerful industry among masters and boys alike; but the whole thing frozen and chilled, partly by the congestion of subjects, partly by antiquated methods.

Moreover, to provide a classical education for the best boys, everything else was sacrificed.  The boys were taught classics, not on the literary method, but on the academic method, as if they were all to enter for triposes and scholarships, and to end by becoming professors.  Instead of simply reading away at interesting and beautiful books, and trying, to cover some ground, a great quantity of pedantic grammar was taught; time was wasted in trying to make the boys compose in both Latin and Greek, when they had no vocabulary, and no knowledge of the languages.  It was like setting children of six and seven to write English in the style of Milton and Carlyle.

The solution is a very obvious one; it is, at all costs to simplify, and to relieve pressure.  The staple of education should be French, easy mathematics, history, geography, and popular science.  I would not even begin Latin or Greek at first.  Then, when the first stages were over, I would have every boy with any special gift put to a single subject, in which he should try to make real progress, but so that there would be time to keep up the simpler subjects as well.  The result would be that when a boy had finished his course, he would have some one subject which he could reasonably be expected to have mastered up to a certain point.  He would have learnt classics, or mathematics, or history, or modern languages, or science, thoroughly; while all might hope to have a competent knowledge of French, English, history, easy mathematics, and easy science.  Boys who had obviously no special aptitude would be kept on at the simple subjects.  And if the result was only that a school sent out boys who could read French easily, and write simple French grammatically, who knew something of modern history and geography, could work out sums in arithmetic, and had some conception of elementary science—­well, they would, I believe, be very fairly educated boys.

The reason why intellectual cynicism sets in, is because the boys, as they go on, feel that they have mastered nothing.  They have been set to compose in Greek and Latin and French; the result is that they have no power of composing in any of these languages, when they might have learnt to compose in one.  Meanwhile, they have not had time to read any English to speak of, or to be practised in writing it.  They know nothing of their own history or of modern geography; and the blame is not with them if they find all knowledge arid and unattractive.

I would try all sorts of experiments.  I would make boys do easy precis-writing; to give a set of boys a simple printed correspondence and tell them to analyse it, would be to give them a task in which the dullest would find some amusement.  I should read a story aloud, or a short episode of history, and require them to re-tell it in their own words.  Or I would relate a simple incident, and make them write it in French; make them write letters in French.  And it would be easy thus to make one subject play into another, because they could be made to give an account in French of something that they had done in science or history.