s defects were so grave and so vital
that, now that it has become discredited (in theory, if not in
practice), we can but wonder how it endured for so long. As an
ingenious instrument for arresting the mental growth of the child,
and deadening all his higher faculties, it has never had, and I
hope will never have, a rival. Far from fostering the growth of
those great expansive instincts--sympathetic, aesthetic, and
scientific--which Nature has implanted in every child, it set itself
to extirpate them, one and all, with ruthless pertinacity. As a
partial compensation for this work of wanton destruction, it made the
child blindly obedient, mechanically industrious, and (within very
narrow limits) accurate and thorough. I have described it at some
length because I see clearly that no one who does not realise what
the elementary school used to be, in the days of its sojourn in the
Land of Bondage, can even begin to understand why it is what it is
to-day.

Having for thirty-three years deprived the teachers of almost every
vestige of freedom, the Department suddenly reversed its policy and
gave them in generous measure the boon which it had so long withheld.
Whether it was wise to give so much at so short a notice may be
doubted. What is beyond dispute is that it was unwise to expect so
great and so unexpected a gift to be used at once to full advantage.
A man who had grown accustomed to semi-darkness would be dazzled to
the verge of blindness if he were suddenly taken out into broad
daylight. This is what was done in 1895 to the teachers of England,
and it is not to be wondered at that many of them have been purblind
ever since. For thirty-three years they had been treated as machines,
and they were suddenly asked to act as intelligent beings. For
thirty-three years they had been practically compelled to do
everything for the child, and they were suddenly expected to give him
freedom and responsibility,--words which for many of them had
well-nigh lost their meaning. To comply with these unreasonable
demands was beyond their power. The grooves into which they had been
forced were far too deep for them. The routine to which they had
become accustomed had far too strong a hold on them. The one change
which they could make was to relax their own severe pressure on the
child. This they did, perhaps without intending to do it. Indeed,
now that there was no external examination to look forward to, the
pressure on the child may b