liament.

4. The intellectual training to be given in the elementary schools
must of course, in the first place, consist in learning to use the
means of acquiring knowledge, or reading, writing, and arithmetic; and
it will be a great matter to teach reading so completely that the act
shall have become easy and pleasant. If reading remains "hard," that
accomplishment will not be much resorted to for instruction, and still
less for amusement--which last is one of its most valuable uses to
hard-worked people.

But along with a due proficiency in the use of the means of learning,
a certain amount of knowledge, of intellectual discipline, and of
artistic training should be conveyed in the elementary schools; and in
this direction--for reasons which I am afraid to repeat, having
urged them so often--I can conceive no subject-matter of education
so appropriate and so important as the rudiments of physical science,
with drawing, modelling, and singing. Not only would such teaching
afford the best possible preparation for the technical schools about
which so much is now said, but the organization for carrying it into
effect already exists. The Science and Art Department, the operations
of which have already attained considerable magnitude, not only offers
to examine and pay the results of such examination in elementary
science and art, but it provides what is still more important, viz.
a means of giving children of high natural ability, who are just as
abundant among the poor as among the rich, a helping hand. A good old
proverb tells us that "One should not take a razor to cut a block:"
the razor is soon spoiled, and the block is not so well cut as it
would be with a hatchet. But it is worse economy to prevent a possible
Watt from being anything but a stoker, or to give a possible Faraday
no chance of doing anything but to bind books. Indeed, the loss in
such cases of mistaken vocation has no measure; it is absolutely
infinite and irreparable. And among the arguments in favour of the
interference of the State in education, none seems to be stronger
than this--that it is the interest of every one that ability should be
neither wasted, nor misapplied, by any one; and, therefore, that every
one's representative, the State, is necessarily fulfilling the wishes
of its constituents when it is helping the capacities to reach their
proper places.

It may be said that the scheme of education here sketched is too large
to be effected