Page:Essays on the Higher Education.djvu/71

 enter here. Whatever improvement is made at this stage must simply be in the way of securing more thorough and genial training of the child in the few subjects with which all education begins, and which every pupil is alike required to know. These schools, then, may be spoken of as the nether-stones of our mill of education; they will stand immovable on the lower side of the instruction of the preparatory schools. Or, to change the figure of speech, they will entail upon the preparatory schools all the deficiencies, follies, and weaknesses, of which they are themselves seized.

I have just spoken of the primary schools, with their imperfect but very stable work of laying the foundations of a common education, as the nether mill-stone on which the fitting-schools have to lie. But on the other side are the colleges and higher scientific schools; these have for years been steadily increasing the gross amount of their demands upon the fitting-schools, and now, under the influence of the new ideas of education, they seem likely to impose yet heavier burdens by a corresponding increase in the variety of these demands. The higher institutions may, then, not inaptly, be compared to the upper mill-stone in the educational mill What is to prevent the preparatory schools from being ground fine between the nether and the upper stones? And yet between the two is the natural and only place for these schools.