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If you believe at all in evolution and progress, and the descent of man from more primitive types, with its wonderfully hopeful corollary, the ascent of man to higher things, you must acknowledge at once that education has necessarily been, and always must be, a great set back to onward movement. A schoolmaster can only teach what he knows, and if one generation only learns what the last generation can teach there is not much hope of onward movement.

Schoolmasters are apt to believe that the hope of the younger generation depends upon their assimilating the ideas of their pastors and masters, whereas the true hope is that they will not be so long overborne by authority, as to make their young brains incapable of rejecting at all events some of the false teaching that each generation complacently offers to the next.

We need not accept the new generation entirely at its own valuation, nor need we disturb ourselves about the exaggerated under-estimate with which one-and-twenty sets down for naught the wisdom of fifty. But unless we pursue education as a preparation for the betterment of the human race we are beating the air. And the responsibility is a great one. For the mind of a child, as Roger Ascham says, is “like the newest wax, most able to receive the best and fairest printing!” But, alas! it is equally able to receive printing of an inferior type. Every one of us, I should imagine, half believes something to-day that he knows to be untrue because it was impressed on the wax of his child-mind by some well-meaning but ignorant schoolmaster.