Having considered the evils produced by sham education, such as is compulsorily given to the masses of the people, we can proceed to examine into the average results effected by more genuine and efficient systems of cramming and instruction. It is not in the least degree necessary, for this purpose, to go into minute comparisons of the various types of secondary schools and colleges that have been established in this country. In the actual method of teaching there is little to choose between them. All have practically a common aim, namely, the preparation of boys and young men for examinations.

Of course, all boys who go to school are not destined for professions that necessitate the passing of an examination, competitive or otherwise. But that does not disturb the school authorities a jot, or involve the slightest relaxation of the school system. The boys are crammed just the same. Whoever wishes to pass through the mill must go in like a pig at one end and come out as a sausage at the other. There is no middle course except the private tutor; and he, owing to the defects of his own early training and to the terrific Conservatism peculiar to his profession, probably knows no better process than the familiar routine of cram and idea-suppression.

The whole of school life is a scramble for marks. The school managers and masters are interested in getting the boys stuffed with facts, dates, figures, and inflections, because the prestige of the school—and consequently its commercial success—is mainly dependent upon the creditable placing of pupils in public examinations. Therefore the boys are encouraged, or rather compelled, to occupy themselves with what will best conduce to secure this object, regardless of their own wishes or obvious inclinations.

A boy might enter a grammar-school, or one of the great public schools, teeming to his finger-tips with an inborn thirst for scientific knowledge; he might spend all his spare moments making crude experiments with an air-pump, or gazing at planets through a cheap astronomical telescope; he might fail dismally to grasp the rudiments of the Latin grammar, and be incapable of conjugating an irregular verb; but his nose would be kept down to the grindstone of the school curriculum all the same, and not the smallest attention paid to his obvious bent of mind.

He had been placed there, the authorities would say, to receive a general education, and a general education he should have. If during the process all the scientific enthusiasm is ground out of him, that is not the business of the schoolmaster. The boy, for the ordinary purposes of instruction, is an empty bottle into which a certain prescription is to be poured. The prescription has been made up beforehand, and cannot be altered. The school undertakes to administer a draught, but it refuses to bother about diagnosing each case. There is only one method of treatment, and every patient who enters the establishment has to be submitted to it.

There have been, of course, enlightened pedagogues. The names of Arnold and Thring will always stand out prominently in the history of English school life, and it will be a bad day indeed for the youth in our public schools when their traditional influence shall have been entirely obliterated. They grafted upon the established methods of teaching a liberal and broad-minded effort to bring out what was best in each pupil by other influences. 'It is no wisdom,' Dr. Arnold declared, 'to make boys prodigies of information; but it is our wisdom and our duty to cultivate their faculties each in its season, first the memory and imagination, and then the judgment; to furnish them with the means, and to excite the desire of improving themselves, and to wait with confidence God's blessing on the result.'

Edward Thring wrote the following remarks in his diary:

'Education is not bookworm work, but the giving the subtle power of observation, the faculty of seeing, the eye and mind to catch hidden truths and new creative genius. If the cursed rule-mongering and technical terms could be banished to limbo, something might be done. Three parts of teaching and learning in England is the hiding common sense and disguising ignorance under phrases.'

No stranger anomaly can be conceived than that presented by the constant effort of these two eminent headmasters to undo the evils of a universal system of education. It is not often that people strive to set their house in order after this fashion, and all honour is due to them for the courageous endeavour. The mistake they made was in tinkering with a system inherently bad and useless, instead of taking the bold step of abolishing it altogether and beginning afresh on new and sound principles.

The energies of schoolmasters of the type of Thring and Arnold are, in fact, concentrated mainly upon a constant struggle to prevent the ordinary process of school instruction from producing prigs. Stupid boys are generally rendered more stupid by teaching, for reasons that will be analyzed later on. But boys whose brains are amenable to academic training are liable, unless the environment of the school is peculiarly unfavourable to the development of the species, to become priggish.

It is the purely academic training that produces the prig. Football, cricket, and other athletic sports are not favourable to his growth; and he receives equally little encouragement from his companions. The important point about him is that he is not a natural product at all, but the outcome of an artificial drilling of the mind. In a word, he is the embodiment of the education system, uncorrected by fortuitous influences and conditions. Everybody knows that gracefulness is not acquired by means of stilted lessons in deportment, but that it consists of natural muscular movement untrammelled by self-consciousness or artifice. The same law of nature applies to the working of the brain. Stuffing a boy's head with so much knowledge is not developing his mind, and the result must necessarily be as artificial as the process. The mind becomes incapable of thinking individually and naturally; it becomes pedantic and circumscribed, powerless to give simple expression to simple thoughts; and the prig is made.

It requires a great deal of kicking and hustling on the part of the victim's schoolfellows to arrest this process, and the cure is generally only effected outwardly. Priggishness cannot be eradicated from the system in a moment, even by the most heroic measures. Its excision involves a slow mental process, the converse of that which served to call it into existence. The prig has to divest himself of the false mental outlook imposed upon him by his education, and to begin all over again. It is a hard lesson which can only be learnt in the school of life, generally after humiliating experience and bitter suffering. Many never succeed in learning it. There must be some material to work upon, and probably their individuality, weak at the commencement and therefore doubly in need of tender treatment and fostering care, has been hopelessly crushed out of existence by the conventional training of school and university.

Under present conditions prigs can and do grow up everywhere. In some educational institutions—notably in great public schools like Eton and Harrow—they are more discouraged than in others; but the cramming system has reached such proportions that all schools and colleges are affected in a greater or less degree. They infect our public life, as we have seen; largely recruit our public service; and are in evidence in the pulpit, at the schoolmaster's desk, on public platforms, in the lecture-room of the university, and wherever the services of educated men are employed.

The ideals of men like Arnold and Thring cannot be carried out as long as the examination system puts a premium upon cramming. 'I call that the best theme,' said Dr. Arnold, alluding to original composition, 'which shows that the boy has read and thought for himself; that the next best, which shows that he has read several books, and digested what he has read; and that the worst, which shows that he has followed but one book, and followed that without reflection.'

There is no time nowadays for a boy to read and think for himself. Besides the examinations inside his own school for which he has to be prepared, there are scholarships, university examinations, competitive examinations for the civil service, and a host of other possibilities of the kind, all of which necessitate the acquisition of an enormous number of useless facts in every branch of learning.

Too much attention is concentrated on the admirable physical product of the athletic side of our public school and university life. This advantage of the English system of education has been dwelt upon to such an extent, that people are apt to overlook the fact that, side by side with these fine specimens of healthy and for the most part unintellectual manhood, we are manufacturing a purely academic article of the least inspired and most retrogressive description.

If somebody, wishing to make you acquainted with a friend, says to you: 'I want you to meet So-and-so; he was at Eton and Trinity Hall, and came out tenth in the mathematical tripos,' you know exactly the kind of man to whom you are going to be introduced. He will have a very proper contempt for made-up ties, and will refuse to fasten the bottom button of his waistcoat. You know beforehand the precise point of view that he will take upon every conceivable topic, and the channels in which his conversation is certain to flow.

His entire mental horizon will be bounded by academic conventionalities in such a cast-iron fashion that it would, you are well aware, waste your time to attempt to extend its boundaries by the fraction of an inch. If you say anything yourself out of the beaten track, you know that you will be looked down upon as a fool or a faddist. The Eton stamp will be upon his dress and manners; the Cambridge brand seared into every crevice of his mind. There will be an individuality about him, but it will be an individuality shared in common with hundreds of young men of the same educational antecedents.

That is the fault of the system. It takes away, or fails to evoke, the distinguishing traits of each individual, and substitutes a kind of manufactured personality according to the particular institution, or type of institution, in which the educational metamorphosis has taken place. 'A mob of boys,' said the man who raised Uppingham from complete obscurity to the front rank of public schools, 'cannot be educated.' It is, nevertheless, the process that is going on all over the civilized world. Reform does not lie alone in making instruction itself more effective. As long as the principle is retained of forcing certain facts and certain subjects into the mind of every boy, the country will continue to breed conventionality, to produce a uniform type of useless mediocrity, and to make prigs.

This is, unfortunately, exactly what the average educationist aims at. There is no disguise about the belief that conventional ideas, and the manufacture of what is called average ability, are the sheet-anchor of the State. And this type of fossilized Conservatism seems to grow in proportion to the number of schools and colleges in the country.

Lower-middle-class young men, of no intellectual predisposition at all, are being turned out on all sides crammed with the narrowest type of educational tradition. Prigs are produced wholesale; the worst and most odious branch of the family being the semi-illiterate prig—the man who gets drummed out of decent regimental messes, the man who wants to go on the stage and declaim Shakespeare through his nose, the man who vulgarizes the public service by dropping his h's in the great Government departments, and others too numerous to be specified.

Everything is vulgar that pretends to be what it is not. Priggishness is an artificial mental condition that is far more common than people generally suspect. We are most of us prigs, if we only knew it. The man who is unable to get rid of conventions and to think for himself is a prig. England is peopled with them. We meet them at every turn; we see them driving the country to the dogs by sheer inability to grasp its needs;—and we send our sons to the schools and universities to be manufactured after the same pattern.