What our teachers fail in—­and the most enthusiastic often fail most hopelessly—­is sympathy and imagination.  They cannot conceive that what moves, touches, and inspires themselves may have no meaning for boys with a different type of mind.

The result of our education can be well reviewed by one who, like myself, after wrestling, often very sorrowfully, with the problems of school education, comes up to a university and gets to know something of these boys at a later stage.  Many of them are fine, vigorous fellows; but they often tend to look upon their work as a disagreeable necessity, which they do conscientiously, expecting nothing in particular from it.  They play games ardently, and fill their hours of leisure with talk about them.  Yet one discerns in mind after mind the germs of intellectual things, undeveloped and bewildered.  Many of them have an interest in something, but they are often ashamed to talk about it.  They have a deep horror of being supposed to be superior; they listen politely to talk about books and pictures, conscious of ignorance, not ill-disposed to listen; but it is all an unreal world to them.

I am all for hard and strenuous work.  I do not at all wish to make work slipshod and dilettante.  I would raise the standards of simple education, and force boys to show that they are working honestly.  I want energy and zeal above everything.  But my honest belief is that you cannot get strenuous and zealous work unless you also have interest and belief in work.  At present, education as conducted in our public-school and university system appears to me to be neither utilitarian nor intellectual.  It aims at being intellectual first and utilitarian afterwards, and it misses both.

Whether anything can be done on a big scale to help us out of the poor tangle in which we are involved, I do not know.  I fear not.  I do not think that the time is ripe.  I do not believe that great movements can be brought about by prophets, however enlightened their views, however vigorous their personalities, unless there is a corresponding energy below.  An individual may initiate and control a great force of public opinion; I do not think he can originate it.  There is certainly a vague and widespread discontent with our present results; but it is all a negative opinion, a dissatisfaction with what is being done.  The movement must have a certain positive character before it can take shape.  There must arise a desire and a respect for intellectual things, a certain mental tone, which is wanting.  At present, public opinion only indicates that the rising generation is not well trained, and that boys, after going through an elaborate education, seem to be very little equipped for practical life.  There is no complaint that boys are made unpractical; the feeling rather is that they are turned out healthy, well-drilled creatures, fond of games, manly, obedient, but with a considerable aversion to settling down to