s the English subjects are
regarded as a subsidiary matter, they are and will be treated by
masters and boys in an easy going manner. Other and sterner subjects
are reckoned on to supply the disciplinary factor which the English
subjects lack. There is, in fact, a very prevalent idea that interest
and discipline vary inversely to one another; that discipline is to be
found in doing what is uninteresting; and that interest is to be found
in doing what is "slack." This is very bad psychology. For we aim at
training willing servants, fit to become masters, not slaves fit for
nothing but slavery. The only valuable discipline is self-discipline,
and self-discipline will only be reached when the boy has realised for
himself that the work is intrinsically worth doing, and when he has
realised that he will have become interested. Again, what is
interesting must be absorbing, and such work can never be "slack." The
mistake seems to arise from a confusion of ideas in connection with the
word "easy." It is no more "easy" to write an adequate essay on the
subject of National Guilds than it is to learn the principal parts of a
large number of irregular verbs: possibly it is much more difficult.
But under certain conditions which we have seen produced, a boy will
find it "easy" to gird himself up to the former task; indeed, he will
get so absorbed that he will find it difficult to leave off. Few
questions are less "easy" than those connected with a paper-money
currency, but one half-holiday afternoon we found a vigorous discussion
on this subject in progress between a group of cricketers whom rain had
driven to the pavilion. Ordinary history teaching, if only time is
allowed and certificate examinations do hot threaten, affords scope for
a great variety of exercises demanding careful thought and accurate
knowledge.

So much in answer to the suggestion that only through the non-political
subjects can real hard work be secured.

The non-political subjects fall into three groups--languages,
mathematics, and the natural sciences.

Probably no one regards the teaching of foreign languages in the public
schools as at all satisfactory at present, and the chief reason is that
far too much is attempted, with far too little consideration of what
will be achieved. Most boys are either simultaneously learning, or
have at one time simultaneously tried to learn, three foreign
languages, Latin, Greek, and French, or Latin, French, and