Efforts to reform the public schools are not new. They’ve been tried and retried, again and again, almost since the beginning of free and compulsory public school education in Massachusetts in the mid 19th. century. And they have all failed.

Why? The problem then and still the problem now, is that the “products” of public schooling, the graduates, not to speak of the ever high number of dropouts, are not, following 8 to 12 years of mostly sitting in public school classrooms and in some cases actually listening to a teacher, the thoughtful, knowledgeable, morally upstanding, well prepared prospective citizens of the country we would have liked.

So we try one reform after another. And we target everything in and about the schools. Often the schools themselves, the physical plant in need of repair; the curriculum that we’re always changing, always a subject of controversy; the length of the school day and school year (shorten the day we say because teens need to sleep, lengthen the year because they also need additional instruction). Now the biggest target may be the poor teachers themselves who are being held accountable for their students learning or not learning. The students, on the other hand, have never been the target of our reform efforts, although being the most important element in the teaching learning mix perhaps they should have been.

At the moment we seem to be experimenting with several reforms, three or more of them simultaneously, and certainly not for the first time. And furthermore the current spate of reforms is led not by the Federal, state and local school departments themselves, but by private foundations, especially what I call the big three, the Gates, Walton, and Broad Foundations, the three with the most money at their disposal.

Some of the most talked about targets of these reforms are school choice, or enabling parents to choose their children’s schools, vouchers, that will permit parents to decide themselves where to spend the monies allotted for their children’s education, the content of the curriculum, now reduced to a common core of subjects that all children will study and learn, and finally greater emphasis on testing, that which among other things will hold the teachers accountable for their students’ learning.

Of course what is left out of the reform efforts, a kind of elephant in the classroom, are the students themselves. They are the proverbially horse that we’ve brought to water and that is not drinking. We now realize that the students, too many of them, are not learning. When will we see that the reforms have little or no effect because the structure we’ve created for the education of our children is clearly the wrong one?

One has only to ask oneself what are the most important characteristics of a real learning situation, in order to then understand why not more of this is going on in the schools. For learning to go on, yes, there has to be a learner and a teacher (the teacher doesn’t have to be a person, and in fact it’s often not), and you might say in that regard the schools have it right.

But what the schools have overlooked, what they still overlook, is on the one hand the readiness of the student, the readiness for learning which includes an interest in learning, and on the other hand, the teacher’s, at least to some substantial degree, mastery of the subject being taught. Go into almost any classroom and you will see little interest of readiness on the student’s part, or subject matter mastery on the part of the teacher.

Ask yourselves where do schools seem to be working well, that is, where are there motivated and interested students who are learning with the help of knowledgeable and skillful teachers, those who are teaching, or better sharing with the students what they know?

Here are three examples of where it does seem to work: Most elementary schools, where children younger than 8 or 9 bring right into the classroom with them the excitement of learning all kinds of things that has been going on within and about them almost since the day they were born. The bottle neck is of course the 3rd or 4th grade, for at that point too often the natural and spontaneous learning about themselves and about the world around them comes to a halt and for most kids it never returns, at least in school in class.

Other areas where the schools do seem to be working: what I will call the “electives,” the subject areas that the children have chosen themselves in line with their own interests, activities and subjects such as theater arts, music, athletics, the fine arts and crafts, and if we would allow it to happen more in our schools, shop, or the vocations. These are the areas where schools as presently constituted could succeed, turning out graduates having acquired the appropriate skills to go on into an area of their own choosing.

What was it that enabled this to happen? The interest, the motivation on the part of the students, and, on the part of the teachers, the fact that they themselves were active practitioners of what they were teaching, —be they musicians, basketball players, carpenters, artists,…

And of course it is not surprising that these are the very subject areas that the school authorities will hold up to the public as being proof of the successful operation of their mission. How many times have we read about the high school band or theater group competing in a regional competition with credit going to the school administrators?

So why do we have the so often referred to “failing schools?” Because in the 19th century the school for all reform, the original reform that would do away with only some children learning to read at home by candlelight and others growing up illiterate, seized hold of the schools and made them into local, state, and Federal compulsory school programs that would turn out those thoughtful, knowledgeable, and morally upstanding and responsible citizens of the Republic that Thomas Jefferson et al. believed the new country couldn’t do without.

And this became the principal mission of the schools, and it failed of course because it was doomed to fail. Basketball we can teach, but virtue, responsible citizenship, we cannot not. The school founding fathers ought to have known this, and not placed this terrible burden on the schools at their very beginning and from which no reform could ever set them free.

What happened was this. Certain subject matters became important to the country’s leaders, and these subjects then (say in the beginning Greek and Latin, history, geography etc.) and now STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), these matters we just had to teach in our schools and the children, all of them, just had to learn them. Otherwise we were, as they say, putting our country at risk.

And of course it was not to be. Most children in the schools were not going to learn even Jefferson’s original “reading, writing and arithmetic” to any significant, let alone liberating level of mastery. Yet we continued to make them take these subjects and they continued to fail in the process.

What should have happened was that most children ought to have been helped to become better at doing what interested them (music, shop, and math) and not be forced to pretend that, say, “critical thinking” was all important to their lives, and in particular their lives as citizens of the country. How many great athletes or musicians are also “critical thinkers?” How many great Americans are even critical thinkers?

My subject is rapidly moving away from me. It’s much too big for a single blog entry. But if we wanted to bring an end to our failing schools the single “reform” that would do this would be to allow schools to be there for the kids, to free the kids, to help them realize their own potentials, and to stop trying to make them into something that would be useful to us, to the country.

And as I’ve said, this can’t be done anyway. And as others have said many, many times, a country’s strength ultimately is something else entirely. A country’s strength is the infrastructure, and infrastructure includes those people who are able to do well that which they were meant to do, as well as the number of bridges that will carry us safely to the other side.

As a footnote to all this, I take the following passages from a Google search of Thomas Jefferson writings on education. In very different words, and attitude, what Jefferson says is not too different from what I’ve been saying:

Among Jefferson’s drafts for new legislation was the celebrated “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” but there was another piece of legislation that Jefferson viewed as even more important: “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge.” In Notes on the State of Virginia (written in 1781), Jefferson summarized his educational plan as follows:

This bill proposes to lay off every county into small districts of five or six miles square, called hundreds, and in each of them to establish a school for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. The tutor to be supported by the hundred, and every person in it entitled to send their children three years gratis, and as much longer as they please, paying for it. These schools to be under a visitor [i.e., superintendent], who is annually to choose the boy of best genius in the school, of those whose parents are too poor to give them further education, and to send him forward to one of the grammar schools [high schools, in effect] of which twenty are proposed to be erected in different parts of [Virginia], for teaching Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic. Of the boys thus sent in any one year, trial is to be made at the grammar schools one or two years, and the best genius of the whole selected, and continued six years, and the residue dismissed. By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammar schools go.

There’s nature, and there’s human nature. And now there is just one method of understanding both, and that method we call science.

Religion used to claim to possess such understanding, to have answers to our questions, but no longer is the claim accepted (the principal promoter of belief is herself no longer believed) and this for the simple reason that its answers are not supported by either reason or evidence, the twin supports on which science has built its own cathedral, made up of blocks of newly discovered natural laws, immaterial but more lasting than the blocks of sandstone used to build the Gothic cathedrals of the Christian Middle Ages and now slowly disintegrating and returning to the sand from whence they came.

St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Scotland

Our understanding of the world, of the natural world if not yet of ourselves, is proceeding apace. Even accelerating as we explore the very large, the cosmos, and the very small, the quantum. Science is on a roll. For never before has man (who as science tells us, has been around in his present form and size, some 100,000 years or more) —never before has man learned so much about nature, —the nature of life, of the natural environment, of evolution, of the earth’s history, of the solar system, and of the seemingly infinite universe or universes beyond. In hardly more than a few hundred years, a two hundredth part or less of man’s so far brief time on earth, science has done this.

In regard to our understanding of human nature the situation is hardly the same. Here science no less than religion is without a clue, or so it might seem from a close look at the recently ended terrible century, the 20th, when man’s inhumanity to man was showcased over and over again, defining what seemed to be man at his worst. Man’s nature, like the weather and currency evaluations still seems to have escaped our attempts to understand it, let alone describe it accurately, and somehow quantify, control and direct it to peaceful ends.

The French painter Paul Gauguin while living in Tahiti at the cusp of the terrible century asked three questions, to which he of course didn’t have the answers. He asked, or rather his painting, now on permanent exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, asked “Woher kommen wir, Wer sind wir, Wohin gehen wir?” Not the kind of questions that a scientist would ask. Until today they have remained unanswerable or at least unanswered questions.Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going? Paul Gauguin, Tahiti, 1897-98.

It’s a fact that only science, in modern times, is on a roll. Otherwise we haven’t made a lot of progress in understanding ourselves, finding out about who or what we are. We couldn’t even say that today we know ourselves better than earlier men, say the cave artists of tens of thousands of years ago in SW France, or the Greeks of 5th century Athens, in particular the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the physician Hippocrates, the philosopher Socrates.

It’s not that we haven’t tried to create a science of human nature. And it’s not that we’re not still trying. We are. And it may even be that we’ve made a bit of a start as, for example, with the publication by the American Psychiatric Association just last year of the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Their effort does appear to be utilizing the method of science, in this case describing, cataloguing, and measuring disorders of the mind.

But unlike the published works of science there is still probably very little agreement regarding the truth and accuracy of the descriptions and probably even less so regarding the Manuel’s conclusions. If I were to say that we have made a start in building a science of human nature, I would look more to the Greeks of 5th century Athens, or to Shakespeare, or to the great works of literature from all lands and peoples, than to our psychiatrists, psychologists and other so-called social scientists.

What is natural science’s secret. How have the physical, biological and mathematical sciences done it? How have these disciplines made so much of nature known and understandable to us all? And by and large they have done so while remaining like the rest of us no less ignorant themselves of their own nature. There’s no mystery about how science proceeds. Science has never tried to hide its methods, or objected to others, the social scientists for example, making liberal use of them. Indeed, along with reason and evidence, transparency or openness might be a third pillar on which science has built its knowledge cathedral.

The late Richard Feynman has given us a good description as anyone of how science goes about its work. I take this description, this account of science’s method from the Introduction to Robert Piccioni’s excellent book, Feynman’s Basic Physics, Simplified. “Simplified” because Piccioni as a Cal Tech student himself, and while attending Feynman’s Lectures, realized just how many of his fellow students needed help in understanding the language of the Nobel Prize winner. Subsequently he wrote Feynman Simplified to provide that help. His book has helped me.

Here’s what Feynman says on the scientific method:

“The things with which we concern ourselves in science appear in myriad forms, and with a multitude of attributes. For example, if we stand on the shore and look at the sea, we see the water, the waves breaking, the foam, the sloshing motion of the water, the sound, the air, the winds and the clouds, the sun and the blue sky, and light; there is sand and there are rocks of various hardness and permanence, color and texture. There are animals and seaweed, hunger and disease, and the observer on the beach; there may be even happiness and thought. Any other spot in nature has a similar variety of things and influences. It is always as complicated as that, no matter where it is. Curiosity demands that we ask questions, that we try to put things together and try to understand the multitude of aspects as perhaps resulting from the action of a relatively small number of elemental things and forces acting in an infinite variety of combinations.

For example: Is the sand other than the rocks? That is, is the sand perhaps nothing but a great number of very tiny stones? Is the moon a great rock? If we understood rocks, would we also understOKand the sand and the moon? Is the wind a sloshing of air analogous to the sloshing motion of water in the sea? What common features do different movements have? What is common to different kinds of sound? How many different colors are there? And so on. In this way we try gradually to analyze all things, to put together things which at first sight look different, with the hope that we may be able to reduce the number of different things and thereby understand them better.”

The scientific method that Feynman describes, —comprising observation, reason, imagination, and experiment, is still what scientists do to understand nature. One focuses one’s look on observable physical reality. One groups things by their samenesses and differences. One tries to determine their make-up, what they’re made of (not the same thing), and while doing so one tries to identify the underlying elements and forces there are, and the fewer the better.

“The famous safe-cracking, bongo-playing, physicist, Richard Feynman, passed away in 1988 but not before winning a Nobel Prize and being one of the coolest dudes ever.” EarthSky 22,  September 2011.                                                            Richard Feynman

I take Feynman’s words here below, perhaps also his bongo-playing, as critical to the acquisition of real knowledge.

Curiosity demands that we ask questions, that we try to put things together and try to understand the multitude of aspects as perhaps resulting from the action of a relatively small number of elemental things and forces acting in an infinite variety of combinations.

Might this method be applied to our attempt to better understand human nature? It certainly has been and is still being tried. Aren’t the still growing number of the social sciences testament to this?  Most all are important areas of thought, need to have their place and be recognized. All would if they could make use of the methods of science while answering such important questions as how we might best educate ourselves, govern ourselves, provide for our needs.

But so far education, political science, psychology, and to a lesser extent economics and medicine, which may come closest of all to being real sciences, seem not yet to have uncovered a substratum of knowledge on which all the discipline’s practitioners might agree, and on which they might build their own knowledge structures as they proceed, as the sciences have built their structures on atomic, electromagnetic, gravitational and other theories.

But that hasn’t yet happened. If I were to take education, something I know a little something about, I’d ask what is the present state of our knowledge of that field? What do we know about education, or what should be the same thing, about how children and people best learn? Much as we know exactly how planets move about the sun in elliptical paths and how a finch’s beak will evolve and change its shape in order to best crack the shell casing of a nut? Is there any body or bit of educational knowledge that is generally accepted by the practitioners, by both child and adult learners, by the teachers and school administrators?

I don’t think so. And the history of school reforms should convince you of this. Compulsory education for the young began in this country less than two centuries ago. Was it scientifically proven at the time that this is how children best learn, by being compelled to sit in school and class so many of the hours of the day?

Of course not. And ever since that time, from that beginning there have been those who would remove the compulsion out of education, you know, you can lead a horse to water, but… But they have not succeeded and today the compulsion is still just as much with us as then. And today also there is absolutely no evidence (science of course has prospered by making great use of “reason and evidence”) that compulsory attendance results in greater learning.

And you could take almost any characteristic of the public schools (for the moment I’m limiting myself just for purposes of illustration to public schooling, probably a very small part of all the “schooling” that actually goes on in the country). But much the same thing might be said of most of our formal learning environments, based as they are not on how people actually learn, not based on recognized principles as to how people best learn, but on what we want to teach, what we want them to learn.

What about this structural characteristic of our schools, does it correspond to some truth about how people best learn? The fact that in our schools children are placed together according to their chronological age? And that this has been going on for some 150 to 200 years, since Horace Mann’s first Common Schools in the 1840s. (Schooling became compulsory in Massachusetts some ten years later.)

Does anyone really believe that this characteristic of our schools has resulted in greater learning? Of course not, everyone knows that differing ages together promote learning, and there’s probably enough evidence out there to “prove” this but no one is trying to do that. A large family and the one room school house, not to mention perhaps the very best learning environment ever, the apprentice at the feet of the master, would have been much better models, much closer to how learning takes place.

And how about this other characteristic of our schools, that children of widely different abilities, needs, and interests, not to mention family backgrounds and family resources, are placed together in a room and are then expected to learn together. It has always been clear that they don’t.

Diversity is not always such a good thing. The differences between our learners are too often just too great for learning to take place, except for a minority of them. But here too we go on doing this. Why? Well we would be a country where we believe that everyone is equal, and that everyone should be treated equally.

Admirable? Well maybe, but the actual result of this has been a disaster in respect to what happens in our schools. If you really could melt them all together, as in a melting pot, well then they might come out all together and the same, but lifeless. But of course no one wants that. We want the differences, that things that make each one of us unique, but we’re not willing to take the time to create an environment where the differences can flourish. Not an easy thing to do, but so far in our schools it has hardly been tried.

There’s no need to continue, to further point our how ineffectual is our system of education, how it is based on ideas without there being evidence or proof of the ideas’ validity and effectiveness. The result is that our schools are a free for all where a few, the gifted, the motivated, often the affluent, succeed; where the many learn, but learn mostly not to pay attention to whatever it is that may be going on about them, supposedly for their benefit, in school and class, and instead go merrily on they own way, happily immersed with their friends in the ubiquitous popular culture of the age; and finally where a growing minority can no longer stomach the school environment which has little or nothing for them, and early on drop out of the activities in class and later on out of school entirely.

If I ever continue with these notes for a science of Education it will be to consider whether in fact there might be such a science. It does seem to be that when real learning takes place there are certain components that might be identified and described and promoted and based on reason and evidence be a part of all learning situations. Here’s a couple of candidates. Could these two be a start of our science of education? An education based on principles obtained by the examination and acceptance of the evidence?

One might be that the most important component of any learning situation is, or should be the learner. How and why have we avoided this truth for so long, the truth that learning, anything more than mindless repetition, must have a learner ready and willing to listen. For learning proceeds not from the teacher but from the efforts of the student. Why have we placed the teacher at the head of the class? At best she ought to be in the back row looking for truths about how in fact her kids now up front and active are learning. Yet our learning structures go on placing the teacher at the head of the class.

Another component might be that what one can learn has a lot to do with one’s talents and interests, and yes, with one’s intelligence, or if you like, as I do, being a longtime admirer of Howard Gardner, one’s intelligences. Wouldn’t a proper science of education have at least as many learning environments out there as there are different talents and interests among the students? Not the way it is now.

In other words shouldn’t a learning situation in order to be successful start with the learners, where they are, what they’re capable of? Now instead we tell them where they should be, even where they should want to be! That, for example, everyone of them without exception should learn algebra, how to write an essay, should eventually go to college. Most kids of course are left behind in this system. And again we are all too familiar with the disaster that has resulted from this and similar prescriptions.

But to sum up, a science of education might be based on this truth about the learner. (And there are probably other truths out there waiting to be discovered and described.) For what one does with his or her own talents and interests is what counts, is in fact what life is all about. That’s the meaning of life-long learning.

And therefore, wouldn’t you think that the very first thing that a school based on the evidence of how people learn would do, would be to help the learner to identify his or her talents and interests and then to help provide a proper environment for them. In my own case I only began to uncover my own talents and interests, such as they are, when my formal schooling was all over. I would have appreciated some help while in school.

This piece of writing first appeared in The Sunday Pictorial, in June of 1918, just months before Germany would sign the armistice at Compiegne on November 11 and the fighting would end. But here Shaw is not writing about the war. He’s writing about education, or what I would call schooling. And what he says is no less relevant and valid for us now, nearly 100 years later.

Perhaps even more relevant, since today just about every child will be compelled to pass 10 or more years in school. Massachusetts passed the first compulsory school attendance law in 1852, and by 1900, 34 states had such laws. By 1910, 72% of American children attended school, half of them in one-room school houses. Now the one-room school houses are gone, but not the schools, and now every child is compelled to attend them, at least through the first two years of high school.

But here he is, George Bernard Shaw, and in this short piece he is making his case against the public schools in Britain, but the case could be made against the schools here, just as well. According to Shaw the principal reason for having the kids in school is that the parents, as well as society at large, don’t know otherwise know what to do with them. My own experience in the schools would lead me to the same conclusion. And the problem arises, of course, because the schools know even less than the parents what to do with them.

This question, what’s wrong with our system of education, unconsciously begs another question, which is, whether our school system is really a system of education at all.

I have alleged, and do still allege, that it is not a system of education but a cloak for something else. And that something else is the sequestration and imprisonment of children so as to prevent them being a continual nuisance to their parents.

That children and adults cannot live together comfortably is a simple fact of nature which must be faced before any discussion of their treatment can advance beyond the present stage of sentimental twaddle.

The blood relationship does not matter: if I have to do my work amid noise and disorder, and break it off repeatedly to console the yelling victim of a broken shin or to act as judge, jury, and executioner in a case of assault with violence; if I have to be at call continually as a dictionary and encyclopedia for an insatiably curious little questioner to whom everything else in the visible universe requires an immediate explanation; if I cannot discuss the Billing case with an adult friend because there is always a small chaperone within earshot; if I have to talk down to the level of a child’s intelligence, and incidentally to humbug it in the interest of my own peace and quietness, for hours every day; if I have to choose between spending my time either answering the question “May we do this?” or shrieking “Don’t dare do that”; if I have to be medical officer of health, wardrobe mistress, sanitary inspector, surgeon for minor operations, fountain of justice and general earthly providence for a houseful of children, the effect on my career is the same whether the children are the issue of my own body or of my neighbor’s: that is, I shall be so interrupted and molested and hindered and hampered in any business, profession, or adult interest, artistic, philosophic, or intellectual, which I may be naturally qualified to pursue, that I shall have to choose between being a mere domestic convenience and getting rid of my children somehow.
Under these circumstances a modern humane parent who can afford it always does get rid of the children by handing them over in their infancy to servants and later on to schoolmasters. The humane parents who cannot afford it let their children run wild. I insist on the word humane because there is a third alternative open to inhuman people.

By simple cruelty they can tame their children to sit still and ask no questions, to make no noise, not to tear their clothes, not to speak until they are spoken to, to be instantly obedient, and to take extraordinary pains to keep their misdeeds concealed (mostly by lying) from their elders.

Many people are so constituted that an occasional exercise in breaking a child’s will, punishing it, and seeing it flinch and scream under the rod or go pale with terror, is pleasurable to them. But this is bad for the child.

Any dog trainer will testify that a spaniel can be spoiled for life by a single act of terrorization; and many human beings have been spoiled in this way. It is no doubt desirable that little boys and girls should have sufficient self-control to sit quietly throughout a suitably short religious service once a week, or to hold their breath whilst swimming under water across a bath; but for most of their time they should be as noisy as nightingales, as restless as squirrels, as curious as monkeys, and quite indifferent to the tidiness of their hair, the integrity of their clothes, or the scrupulous cleanliness of their persons.

The humane parent knows this and puts up with it when the children are about; but that is precisely why humane parents are the first to get rid of their children under pretence of “sending them to be educated.”
The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents’ hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.

That is what is wrong with our so-called educational system. Every genuine teacher knows it. Every person who understands children and sympathizes with them, like Dr. Montessori, knows it. Everyone who, like the wife of the Master Builder in Ibsen’s play, has a genius for fostering the souls of little children, knows it. But I am the only person who ever mentions it; and not one of those who have pretended to discuss my views has ever dared to allude to it.
When I tell the story of my friend who, in a hasty fit of sympathy with a beaten child, punched the head of an elementary schoolmaster, and was fined two pounds and informed that he would have been fined six if he had hit a gentleman, elementary schoolmasters, against whose scandalous underpayment I have always protested, rage at me for disparaging their gentility (as if the valuation had been made by me); but they have never squarely faced the fact that the wages and the social standing of the skilled and earnest teacher of genuine vocation is kept down by the competition of the fellow who, because he can lock a school gate and hurt a child with a cane, can therefore do all that the children’s parents pay for. Such an unskilled ruffian can always depend on the parents supporting him in any further pretensions he may make; for do they not owe to him the quietude and freedom of their lives?

The result is that when war emergencies subject the so-called education of our governing classes to a stringent practical test, we discover that their ignorance costs millions of money and thousands of lives, and is quite staggering to the two classes who have to save the situation: namely, the self-educated and the truants.

By the self-educated I mean those who have taken advantage of the voluntary associations, the Summer Schools, the professional societies, the propagandist organizations which continually keep up a supply of lectures and controversial discussions under free conditions, and also of the access to literature and art and music provided by our libraries, galleries, concerts, theatres, and the like.

If every secondary school and university in the kingdom were wiped out by an air raid tomorrow, and their staffs buried amid the ill-concealed exultation of their unfortunate pupils, thereby throwing our young people on the agencies I have just named, there would be an immediate and enormous increase in the number of really educated persons in England, and a quite blessed disappearance of a mass of corruptly inculcated error and obsolescence, and of that intense hatred of intellectual and artistic culture which exists today among our public schools and university graduates because it is known to them only as an excuse for loathsome prison tasks.

When young people are as free to walk out of a classroom where they are bored by a dull teacher as grown-up people are to walk out of a theatre where they are bored by a dull playwright, the schools will be far more crowded than the theatres, and the teachers far more popular than the actors. Until then we shall remain the barbarians we are at present.

Formerly, when games were forbidden in schools, and children were expected to study Latin for twelve hours a day, the children were keen on games and fighting.
Now that games have been made compulsory school subjects, boys will soon hate athletics and fighting as they now hate “English literature,” and their country will be gathered like a daisy by the first vigorous nation that ventures to cultivate its wits and its muscles in freedom.

For my part, I thank my stars every day that as the German “system of education” differs from ours only in being more thoroughly carried out, and much more sincerely believed in, we may win the war by virtue of being less “educated” than our chief antagonist.