The mistake they made was in tinkering
with a system inherently bad and useless, instead of taking the bold
step of abolishing it altogether and beginning afresh on new and sound
principles.

The energies of schoolmasters of the type of Thring and Arnold are, in
fact, concentrated mainly upon a constant struggle to prevent the
ordinary process of school instruction from producing prigs. Stupid boys
are generally rendered more stupid by teaching, for reasons that will be
analyzed later on. But boys whose brains are amenable to academic
training are liable, unless the environment of the school is peculiarly
unfavourable to the development of the species, to become priggish.

It is the purely academic training that produces the prig. Football,
cricket, and other athletic sports are not favourable to his growth; and
he receives equally little encouragement from his companions. The
important point about him is that he is not a natural product at all,
but the outcome of an artificial drilling of the mind. In a word, he is
the embodiment of the education system, uncorrected by fortuitous
influences and conditions. Everybody knows that gracefulness is not
acquired by means of stilted lessons in deportment, but that it consists
of natural muscular movement untrammelled by self-consciousness or
artifice. The same law of nature applies to the working of the brain.
Stuffing a boy's head with so much knowledge is not developing his mind,
and the result must necessarily be as artificial as the process. The
mind becomes incapable of thinking individually and naturally; it
becomes pedantic and circumscribed, powerless to give simple expression
to simple thoughts; and the prig is made.

It requires a great deal of kicking and hustling on the part of the
victim's schoolfellows to arrest this process, and the cure is generally
only effected outwardly. Priggishness cannot be eradicated from the
system in a moment, even by the most heroic measures. Its excision
involves a slow mental process, the converse of that which served to
call it into existence. The prig has to divest himself of the false
mental outlook imposed upon him by his education, and to begin all over
again. It is a hard lesson which can only be learnt in the school of
life, generally after humiliating experience and bitter suffering. Many
never succeed in learning it. There must be some material to work upon,
and probably their individuality, weak at the commencement and t