ne a condition of greater vacuity
than that in which a man leaves the University after taking a pass
degree. No one has endeavoured to do anything for him, or to cultivate
his intelligence in any line. And yet these are our parents in the next
generation. And the only way in which we stifle mental revolt is by
leaving our victims in such a condition of mental abjectness and
intellectual humility, that it does not even occur to them to complain
of how unjustly they have been treated. After all, we have interfered
with them so little that they have contrived to have a good time at the
University. They have made friends, played games, and lived a healthy
life enough; they resolve that their boys shall have a good time too,
if possible; and so the poor educational farce is played on from
generation to generation. It is melancholy to read the sonnet which
Tennyson wrote, more than sixty years ago, a grave and bitter
indictment of Cambridge--

"Because you do profess to teach,
And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart."

That is the mistake: we do not feed the heart; we are too professional;
we concern ourselves with methods and details; we swallow blindly the
elaborate tradition under which we have ourselves been educated; we
continue to respect the erudite mind, and to decry the appreciative
spirit as amateurish and dilettante. We continue to think that a boy is
well trained in history if he has a minute knowledge of the sequence of
events--that is, of course, a necessary part of the equipment of a
professor or a teacher; but here again lies one of the fatal fallacies
of our system--that we train from the professorial point of view.
Omniscience is not even desirable in the ordinary mind. A boy who has
appreciated the force of a few great historical characters, who has
learnt generous insight into the unselfish patriotism that wins the
great victories of the world, who can see the horror of tyranny and the
wrongs done to humanity in the name of authority, who has seen how a
nation in earlier stages is best ruled by an enlightened despotism,
until it has learnt vigour and honesty and truth, who has: learnt to
perceive that political agitation only survives in virtue of the
justice which underlies its demands--a boy, I say, who has been taught
to perceive such things, has learnt the lesson of history in a way
which a student crammed with dates and facts may have wholly missed.

The truth is that we do n