You know beforehand the precise point of view that he
will take upon every conceivable topic, and the channels in which his
conversation is certain to flow.

His entire mental horizon will be bounded by academic conventionalities
in such a cast-iron fashion that it would, you are well aware, waste
your time to attempt to extend its boundaries by the fraction of an
inch. If you say anything yourself out of the beaten track, you know
that you will be looked down upon as a fool or a faddist. The Eton stamp
will be upon his dress and manners; the Cambridge brand seared into
every crevice of his mind. There will be an individuality about him, but
it will be an individuality shared in common with hundreds of young men
of the same educational antecedents.

That is the fault of the system. It takes away, or fails to evoke, the
distinguishing traits of each individual, and substitutes a kind of
manufactured personality according to the particular institution, or
type of institution, in which the educational metamorphosis has taken
place. 'A mob of boys,' said the man who raised Uppingham from complete
obscurity to the front rank of public schools, 'cannot be educated.' It
is, nevertheless, the process that is going on all over the civilized
world. Reform does not lie alone in making instruction itself more
effective. As long as the principle is retained of forcing certain facts
and certain subjects into the mind of every boy, the country will
continue to breed conventionality, to produce a uniform type of useless
mediocrity, and to make prigs.

This is, unfortunately, exactly what the average educationist aims at.
There is no disguise about the belief that conventional ideas, and the
manufacture of what is called average ability, are the sheet-anchor of
the State. And this type of fossilized Conservatism seems to grow in
proportion to the number of schools and colleges in the country.

Lower-middle-class young men, of no intellectual predisposition at all,
are being turned out on all sides crammed with the narrowest type of
educational tradition. Prigs are produced wholesale; the worst and most
odious branch of the family being the semi-illiterate prig--the man who
gets drummed out of decent regimental messes, the man who wants to go on
the stage and declaim Shakespeare through his nose, the man who
vulgarizes the public service by dropping his h's in the great
Government departments, and others too numerous to be specified.