reams of as absolute beauty, and reason as a beacon-lamp
of all-illuminating light, flashing forth alternately as absolute
reality and absolute truth.

[17] I shall perhaps be told that my extravagant idealism is
out of place in a book on elementary education. To this possible
reproach I can but answer, in Mrs. Browning's words, that--

It takes the ideal to blow a hair's breadth off
The dust of the actual.

My experience of Utopia has convinced me that in taking thought for
the education of the young it is impossible to be too idealistic, and
that the more "commonsensical" and "utilitarian" one's philosophy of
education, the shallower and falser it will prove to be.

[18] An informal report to me, not a formal report to the
Board of Education.

[19] Real, in the sense that the beauty of form and colour
is more real than either form or colour, and that a law of Nature is
more real than an isolated fact.

CHAPTER V

EDUCATION THROUGH SELF-REALISATION

Activity, versatility, imaginative sympathy, a large and free
outlook, self-forgetfulness, charm of manner, joy of heart,--are
there many schools in England in which the soil and atmosphere are
favourable to the vigorous growth of all these qualities? I doubt it.
In the secondary schools, of all grades and types, the education
given is so one-sided, thanks to the inexorable pressure of the
scholarship system, that the harmonious development of the child's
nature is not to be looked for. In the elementary schools, from which
the chilling shadow cast by thirty years of "payment by results" is
passing slowly--very slowly--away, the instinct of the teacher is to
distrust the child and do everything, or nearly everything, for him,
the result being that the whole _regime_ is still unfavourable to the
spontaneous outgrowth of the child's higher qualities. There are of
course schools, both secondary and elementary, in which one or more
of the Utopian qualities flourish with considerable vigour. There are
elementary schools, for example, in which the children, being allowed
by enterprising teachers to walk in new paths without leading
strings, have become unexpectedly active and versatile. And there are
others--mostly in the slum regions of great towns--in which the
devotion, the sympathetic kindness, and the gracious bearing of the
teachers have won from the children the response of unselfish
affection, attractive manners, and happy faces.[20] Yet even in the