his significant fact? In my attempt to
account for the failure of elementary education in England to foster
the growth of the educated child, I have travelled far. But I
must travel farther yet. The Western belief in the efficacy
of examinations is a symptom of a widespread and deep-seated
tendency,--the tendency to judge according to the appearance of
things, to attach supreme importance to visible "results," to measure
inward worth by outward standards, to estimate progress in terms of
what the "world" reveres as "success." It is the Western standard of
values, the Western way of looking at things, which is in question,
and which I must now attempt to determine.

That I should have to undertake this task is a proof of the
complexity of education, of the bewildering tanglement of its
root-system, of the depths to which some of its roots descend into
the subsoil of human-life. The defect in our system of education
which I am trying to diagnose is one which the "business man," who
may have had reason to complain of the output of our elementary
schools, will probably account for in one sentence and propound a
remedy for in another. But I, who know enough about education to
realise how little is or can be known about it, find that if I am to
understand why so many schools turn out helpless and resourceless
children, I must go back to the first principles of modern
civilisation, or in other words to the cardinal axioms of the
philosophy of the West.

This does not mean that I must make a systematic study of Western
metaphysics. Professional thinkers abound in the West; but the rank
and file of the people pay little heed to them. It is true that they
take themselves very seriously; but so does every clique of experts
and connoisseurs. The indirect influence of their theories has at
times been considerable; but their direct influence on human thought
is, and has always been, very slight. For the plain average man, who
cannot rid himself of the suspicion that the professional thinker is
a professional word-juggler, has a philosophy of his own which was
formulated for him by an unphilosophical people, and which, though it
is now beginning to fail him, was once sufficient for all his needs.

At the present moment there are two schools of popular thought in the
West. For many centuries there was only one. For many centuries men
were content to believe that the outward and visible world--the world
of their normal experience--w