Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/297

Rh until a leaving-examination which shows his progress to have been satisfactory in all three sets him free to follow his inclination by pursuing exclusively the subject which suits him best; happy since eminence in that one will not have been purchased by entire ignorance of all the others. Unfortunately, though most necessarily—for this report concerns schools only—the curtain drops upon this interesting moment of transition, shutting out of view the influence which university scholarships and exhibitions exercise upon school-work, and thus ignoring an obstacle to the realization of the programme far greater than want of money, want of time, or want of appreciation, in the schools themselves.

What is the avowed object and purpose of the higher English school education? Is it the even and progressive development of young minds? the strengthening in equal proportion of the faculties of imagination, memory, reason, observation? the opening doors of knowledge in the plastic time of youth, which if not opened then will be fast closed in later years by the pressure of active work, or habitual exclusiveness, or energies paralyzed through disuse? Nothing of the kind. It is constructed entirely with the aim of winning certain prizes; for scholarships with which a costly university bribes men to come to it for education; for class-lists leading up to college fellowships; for the lucrative posts of military and civil service. In all these, but most of all where the universities can determine the ordeal, one principle of success has been established, and that principle is one-sidedness. The candidate for India, for Woolwich, for Cooper's Hill, must at an early age select certain subjects and throw overboard all the rest. The childish aspirant to the entrance scholarships of a public school is placed in the hands of a crammer at eight years old, that at thirteen he may turn out Latin verses as a Buddhist prayer-mill turns out prayers, and may manifest, as a distinguished head-master has lately said, to the eye of a teacher searching for intelligence, thoughtfulness, promise, intenseness, "a stupidity which is absolutely appalling." His scholarship won, he is pledged to pursue a course whose benefits are tangible and its evil consequences remote. The universities have stamped upon all the schools one deep certainty, that for a boy to be "all around," as it is called, is the irremissible sin; that a school-master who teaches with reference to intellectual growth and width of culture sacrifices thereby all hope of the distinctions which make a school famous and increase its numbers. If a classical scholarship is desired, science and mathematics are abandoned: nay, the palm of literary excellence is conceded even to men ignorant of the noblest literature in the world, their own birthright and inheritance, and knowing less of the history and structure of the English language than a fourth-form boy knows of Greek. If mathematical success is aimed at, literature and science are ignored; if the few science scholarships existing tempt candidates from any of "the thirteen schools