lines, and the
power of rapidly taking up and using such detailed knowledge as may be
needed for special occasions. It is upon the first count that the
British schools and universities have been most open to criticism. We
have found the British university-trained class under the fiery tests of
this war an evasive, temporising class of people, individualistic,
ungenerous, and unable either to produce or obey vigorous leadership. On
the whole, it is a matter for congratulation, it says wonderful things
for the inherent natural qualities of the English-speaking peoples, that
things have proved no worse than they are, considering the nature of the
higher education under which they have suffered.

Consider in what that educational process has consisted. Its backbone
has been the teaching of Latin by men who can read, write, and speak it
rather worse than a third-rate Babu speaks English, and of Ancient Greek
by teachers who at best half know this fine lost language. They do not
expect any real mastery of either tongue by their students, and
naturally, therefore, no real mastery is ever attained. The boys and
young men just muff about at it for three times as long as would be
needed to master completely both those tongues if they had "live"
teachers, and so they acquire habits of busy futility and petty
pedantry in all intellectual processes that haunt them throughout life.
There are also sterile mathematical studies that never get from
"exercises" to practice. There is a pretence of studying philosophy
based on Greek texts that few of the teachers and none of the taught can
read comfortably, and a certain amount of history. The Modern History
School at Oxford, for example, is the queerest collection of chunks of
reading. English history from the beginning, with occasional glances at
Continental affairs, European history for about a century, bits of
economics, and--the _Politics_ of Aristotle! It is not education; it is
a jack-daw collection....This sort of jumble has been the essentials of
the more pretentious type of "higher education" available in Great
Britain up to the present.

In this manner, through all the most sensitive and receptive years of
life, our boys have been trained in "how not to get there," in a variety
of disconnected subjects, by men who have never "got there," and it
would be difficult to imagine any curriculum more calculated to produce
a miscellaneous incompetence. They have also, it happens, recei