rasp the rudiments of the Latin
grammar, and be incapable of conjugating an irregular verb; but his nose
would be kept down to the grindstone of the school curriculum all the
same, and not the smallest attention paid to his obvious bent of mind.

He had been placed there, the authorities would say, to receive a
general education, and a general education he should have. If during the
process all the scientific enthusiasm is ground out of him, that is not
the business of the schoolmaster. The boy, for the ordinary purposes of
instruction, is an empty bottle into which a certain prescription is to
be poured. The prescription has been made up beforehand, and cannot be
altered. The school undertakes to administer a draught, but it refuses
to bother about diagnosing each case. There is only one method of
treatment, and every patient who enters the establishment has to be
submitted to it.

There have been, of course, enlightened pedagogues. The names of Arnold
and Thring will always stand out prominently in the history of English
school life, and it will be a bad day indeed for the youth in our public
schools when their traditional influence shall have been entirely
obliterated. They grafted upon the established methods of teaching a
liberal and broad-minded effort to bring out what was best in each pupil
by other influences. 'It is no wisdom,' Dr. Arnold declared, 'to make
boys prodigies of information; but it is our wisdom and our duty to
cultivate their faculties each in its season, first the memory and
imagination, and then the judgment; to furnish them with the means, and
to excite the desire of improving themselves, and to wait with
confidence God's blessing on the result.'

Edward Thring wrote the following remarks in his diary:

'Education is not bookworm work, but the giving the subtle power of
observation, the faculty of seeing, the eye and mind to catch hidden
truths and new creative genius. If the cursed rule-mongering and
technical terms could be banished to limbo, something might be done.
Three parts of teaching and learning in England is the hiding common
sense and disguising ignorance under phrases.'

No stranger anomaly can be conceived than that presented by the
constant effort of these two eminent headmasters to undo the evils of a
universal system of education. It is not often that people strive to set
their house in order after this fashion, and all honour is due to them
for the courageous endeavour.