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Now schoolmasters, since the Renascence, have been in the habit of leading all their pupils through the back slums of the Seven Dials and Soho in the direction of the British Museum, with the avowed purpose of taking them to the library, although they knew full well that not one pupil in ten, not one in fifty, would ever reach the door. To produce a few scholars able to appreciate the classics of Greece and Rome they have sacrificed everybody else; and according to their own showing they have condemned a large portion of the upper classes, nearly all the middle classes, and quite all the poorer classes to remain “uneducated.” And, according to the theory of the schoolroom, one-half of the human race—the women—have not been supposed to need education. For them “accomplishments” have been held sufficient.

§ 17. V. In conclusion I must point out one effect of the Renascence ideal which seems to me no less mischievous than those I have already mentioned. This ideal led the schoolmasters to attach little importance to the education of children. Directly their pupils were old enough for Latin Grammar the schoolmasters were quite at home; but till then the children’s time seemed to them of small value, and they neither knew nor cared to know how to employ it. If the little ones could learn by heart forms of words which would afterwards “come in useful,” the schoolmasters were ready to assist such learning by unsparing application of the rod, but no other learning seemed worthy even of a caning. Absorbed in the world of books they overlooked the world of nature. Galileo complains that he could not induce them to look through his telescope, for they held that truth could be arrived at only by comparison of MSS. No wonder then that they had so little sympathy with children, and did not know how to teach them. It is by slow degrees that we are breaking away from the bad tradition then established, are getting to understand children, and with such leaders as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel, are investigating the best education for them. We no longer think of them as immature men and women, but see that each stage has its own completeness, and that there is a perfection in childhood which must precede the perfection of manhood just as truly as the flower goes before the fruit. “Childhood,” says Rousseau, “has its own ways of seeing, feeling, thinking;” and it is by studying these that we find out how children should be educated. Our connexion with the world of nature seems much closer in our early years than ever afterwards. The child’s mind seems drawn out to its surroundings. He is intensely interested in the new world in which he finds himself, and whilst so many of us grown people need a flapper, like the sages of Laputa, to call our attention from our own thoughts to anything that meets the eye or ear, the child sees and hears everything, and everything seen or heard becomes associated in his mind not so much with thought as with feeling. Hence it is that we most of us look back wistfully to our early days, and confess sorrowfully that though years may have brought “the philosophic mind,”