And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart."


That is the mistake: we do not feed the heart; we are too
professional; we concern ourselves with methods and details; we
swallow blindly the elaborate tradition under which we have
ourselves been educated; we continue to respect the erudite mind,
and to decry the appreciative spirit as amateurish and dilettante.
We continue to think that a boy is well trained in history if he
has a minute knowledge of the sequence of events--that is, of
course, a necessary part of the equipment of a professor or a
teacher; but here again lies one of the fatal fallacies of our
system--that we train from the professorial point of view.
Omniscience is not even desirable in the ordinary mind. A boy who
has appreciated the force of a few great historical characters, who
has learnt generous insight into the unselfish patriotism that wins
the great victories of the world, who can see the horror of tyranny
and the wrongs done to humanity in the name of authority, who has
seen how a nation in earlier stages is best ruled by an enlightened
despotism, until it has learnt vigour and honesty and truth, who
has: learnt to perceive that political agitation only survives in
virtue of the justice which underlies its demands--a boy, I say,
who has been taught to perceive such things, has learnt the lesson
of history in a way which a student crammed with dates and facts
may have wholly missed.

The truth is that we do not know what we are aiming at. Our school
and university systems aim at present at an austere standard of
mental discipline, and then fail to enforce it, by making
inevitable concessions to the mental weakness inherited from long