be retained
much longer, if it can be said with any truth that young men who leave
school at eighteen are in many cases unable to read or to enjoy a
classical text, unless they have seen it before.

Classical teaching, and all purely scholastic teaching, ought to be
finished at school. When a young man goes to a University, unless he means
to make scholarship his profession, he ought to be free to enter upon a
new career. If he has not learnt by that time so much of Greek and Latin
as is absolutely necessary in after-life for a lawyer, or a student of
physical science, or even a clergyman, either he or his school is to
blame. I do not mean to say that it would not be most desirable for every
one during his University career to attend some lectures on classical
literature, on ancient history, philosophy, or art. What is to be
deprecated is, that the University should have to do the work which
belongs properly to the school.

The best colleges at Oxford and Cambridge have shown by their
matriculation examinations what the standard of classical knowledge ought
to be at eighteen or nineteen. That standard can be reached by boys while
still at school, as has been proved both by the so-called local
examinations, and by the examinations of schools held under the Delegates
appointed by the Universities. If, therefore, the University would
reassert her old right, and make the first examination, called at Oxford
Responsions, a general matriculation examination for admission to the
University, not only would the public schools be stimulated to greater
efforts, but the teaching of the University might assume, from the very
beginning, that academic character which ought to distinguish it from mere
school-boy work.

Academic teaching ought to be not merely a continuation, but in one sense
a correction of scholastic teaching. While at school instruction must be
chiefly dogmatic, at the University is it to be Sokratic? for I find no
better name for that method which is to set a man free from the burden of
purely traditional knowledge; to make him feel that the words which he
uses are often empty, that the concepts he employs are, for the most part,
mere bundles picked up at random; that even where he knows facts he does
not know the evidence for them; and where he expresses opinions, they are
mostly mere dogmas, adopted by him without examination.

But for the Universities, I should indeed fear that Mill's prophecies
might come tr