of "Occidentalism." Nor do I think
that the defects of his schools are graver than those of other
educational institutions. In my judgment they are less grave because,
though perhaps more glaring, they have not had time to become so
deeply rooted, and are therefore, one may surmise, less difficult to
eradicate. Also there is at least a breath of healthy discontent
stirring in the field of elementary education, a breath which
sometimes blows the mist away and gives us sudden gleams of sunshine,
whereas over the higher levels of the educational world there hangs
the heavy stupor of profound self-satisfaction.[1] I am not
exaggerating when I say that at this moment there are elementary
schools in England in which the life of the children is emancipative
and educative to an extent which is unsurpassed, and perhaps
unequalled, in any other type or grade of school.

I am careful to say all this because I foresee that, without a
"foreword" of explanation, my adverse criticism of what I have called
"a familiar type of school" may be construed into an attack on the
elementary teachers as a body. I should be very sorry if such a
construction were put upon it. No one knows better than I do that the
elementary teachers of this country are the victims of a vicious
conception of education which has behind it twenty centuries of
tradition and prescription, and the malign influence of which was
intensified in their case by thirty years or more[2] of Code
despotism and "payment by results." Handicapped as they have been by
this and other adverse conditions, they have yet produced a noble
band of pioneers, to whom I, for one, owe what little I know about
the inner meaning of education; and if I take an unduly high
standard in judging of their work, the reason is that they
themselves, by the brilliance of their isolated achievements, have
compelled me to take it. I will therefore ask them to bear with me,
while I expose with almost brutal candour the shortcomings of many of
their schools. They will understand that all the time I am thinking
of education in general even more than of elementary education,
and using my knowledge of the latter to illustrate statements and
arguments which are really intended to tell against the former. They
will also understand that at the back of my mind I am laying the
blame of their failures, not on them but on the hostile forces which
have been too strong for many of them,--on the false assumptions of
W