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In any commercial country it should not be necessary to apologise for the endeavour to make a rough balance-sheet describing the liabilities of education; even if we are all convinced that the assets of education are more than enough to meet the liabilities and that we are educationally solvent. Nor am I really stating anything very new or startling, for all thinkers and writers on education seem beginning at last to discover that education is only a means to an end, and that when you have no clear idea of what end you hope to arrive at it is not very probable that you will choose the right means.

If a man wanted to travel to Blackpool and was so ignorant as to imagine that Blackpool was in the neighbourhood of London, he would probably in the length of his journey lose many beautiful hours of the sea-side and spend them in the stuffy atmosphere of a railway train. This would be of little importance to the community if it was only the case of an individual man—a schoolmaster for instance. But what if the man had taken a party of children with him? thereby losing for them wonderful hours of digging on the sand, or seeing Punch or Judy, or listening to a Bishop preaching—that indeed would be a serious state of things for everyone.