In the first place it must be borne in mind that one great difference in the attitude of this form to life in general in the future will be caused by the fact that it will be a mixed class of boys and girls, and will be recruited from all sections of the people, so that there will be every chance of there being practically no divergence in age, physique or intelligence between the top and bottom, to use the existing phraseology, between A and Z, as they will then be placed.

The boys and girls will be permitted to get up as early in the morning as they like, but not later than 7.30 in the summer months. Breakfast will follow at once in different Houses, boys and girls sitting at the same table as much mixed as possible, friend with friend. Chapel for those who wish to go will follow, a service short, devotional, sincere, containing a few personal prayers, a rousing well-known hymn and a lesson of particular applicability not necessarily taken from the Bible alone, but from any of the great masterpieces of the world. Masters and mistresses who feel inspired to give a personal address of not more than five minutes on any problem that may have been occupying their minds may interpolate their sermonette in the place of this lesson. This, the only service of the day, will not take longer than twelve minutes. If the weather is fine most of the work of the day will be done out of doors, some of it, such as the manual labour classes, the digging, road-mending, gardening, will necessarily be so, but in favourable circumstances the intellectual side of the curriculum will be as far as possible carried out in the open air. If, however, this is to-day impossible, the Latin hour will be conducted in a classroom, where inspiring pictures, replicas of old masters and pieces of sculpture will make an already bright, airy, cheerful, healthy classroom still more so.

The master, mistress, girls and boys will all be dressed in those clothes considered most sane and healthy from the eugenics point of view; flannels and gymnastic dress will probably be most popular. The Latin taught will certainly not be of the grammar-grind sort: conversation will go on between girl and boy, others in the same class will be constructing a Roman amphitheatre, or working out, on a sort of Daily Mail war board, a campaign of Pompey or CÆsar.

The life of a Roman citizen will be enacted and written about by the classes: all the time the boys and girls will be doing the work; the teacher only flitting about from group to group as his or her presence is required, encouraging here, pointing out errors there, all the time acting as any real teacher ought to act, that is, not foisting his or her opinion on to the form but developing their own ideas on the lines most desirable for them.

The hour instead of passing as hours in school are passing nowadays in periods of long, slowly dragging minutes that make time seem interminable to those who take out their watches in the vain hope that Father Time will take a hint and have mercy, will go so quickly in the interest and joy of real work and progress that the form will only regret having to leave the subject, were it not that the next is just as full of interest, just as helpful.

It is mathematics in this second period carried out in a sort of engineering schoolroom where practical implements are at hand for testing all their theoretical results.

One section of the class to-day splits up into a lot of stockbrokers and the rest into investors. Each investor has his own bag of gold or counters, his own cheque-book, the daily newspapers are brought into school and consulted, and each youthful financier tries his fortune with the investment that most suits his fancy at the time. Day by day he develops his original idea, buying here, selling there, so that his knowledge of stocks and shares by the end of a term is unassailable; the foundation is laid of a character that will not play ducks and drakes with his own real money in later life if he finds that his splashes now hold him up to ridicule from his fellows at school. In geometry the forms will invent their own problems and work out together as a body any that defeat the individual intelligence. And again the teacher's aid will only be invoked as a last resource; the children will teach themselves. Buying and selling, commission and percentage work will all be done as it were in real life by the taking of a case that one of the form invents or by going the round of the shops in the town or village and auditing their accounts, looking into their businesses and receiving real instruction from those whose life's work it is to conduct a trade or business, so that here again the factor of reality so absolutely essential to the intelligent learner shall be brought into play.

By the end of a term each pupil or at any rate each form will have produced its own algebra, arithmetic and geometry, and these will be stored in the archives of the form if they are thought to be of sufficient value. At any rate they will be the only textbooks they will see in these subjects.

The period following on this will be an outdoor one if possible, either one of those mentioned above or a natural history study in the nearest wood, or drawing of the surrounding country, or dancing on the platform permanently kept for that purpose in a corner of the playing-fields to a gramophone, or singing in the open air, or any exercise or physical training decided on as beneficial to the human frame! From this the form will come in refreshed in body ready for more intellectual stimulus.

Then follows the hour of history and geography; the history on a plan rudely devised in the early part of the twentieth century by Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher in his "Sir Roger of Tubney" and Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer in "Ladies Whose Bright Eyes," where all our ancestors, their customs and reasons for their strange actions, stand out clearly in the broadest outlines as real living forces. The Elizabethan adventurer, the peasant, the villein, the Norman baron, the various Kings, the Cavalier gallant, the Augustan Age courtier, the Georgian politician, the powder-puff-age lady satirized by Addison, all will live as actually as our own relatives and friends.

Scenes from history again will be acted in costume, debates will take place in class as to why Shakespeare does not see fit to mention Magna Charta, what effects followed, what causes, why enthusiasm was held in such disdain in the eighteenth century, and altogether, hand in hand with the literature of its age, the history of each period in the nation's life will be carefully worked out, and its bearing on present-day character and custom soundly sifted and thrashed out.

I said geography would be taken at the same time: geography as studied in the new schools will be an excellent mixture of political economy, history (really it is hard to separate the two), science and mathematics, all in their relation to actual facts.

Calculations of temperatures by isotherms, geological strata, even numerical facts about other races, all of these things will strike home and be found of paramount interest to boys and girls, but most especially will this be the case when, as will always happen, the form decide to work out and write up in detail the accurate history and geography of their school and the district immediately surrounding it. This will give so much, such ample opportunity for the rousing of and keeping keenly alive their faculties, that of all subjects, history and geography will be the hardest from which to tear the ardent enthusiasts. The nature of the soil, the various winds that blow, the effect of these winds on the weather, that is, what weather to expect after different winds, the rainfall, the contour of the outlying lands, the agricultural state, the condition of the crops—the list might be magnified into a book by itself, all these things will help the child to a better and truer understanding of the making of history and geography than any textbook, and will prove of lasting worth to him as a useful citizen of the future. After this period there will follow an entirely free time, when the school will be at liberty to follow its own devices until lunch-time: there will be voluntary lectures on all sorts of subjects that appeal to the stamp-collector's or the natural historian's mind by men and women who have made their mark. Great explorers and big-game hunters will themselves come and give an account of their exciting experiences. Perpetual pianolas, perpetual cinematograph films will be in use during these hours in which the school is at liberty. In the afternoon, free time will be given for games of every description to be played, no particular partiality being extended to one over another. Running, swimming, tennis, basket-ball, racquets, fives, golf, cricket, shooting, all will be equally accessible and equally encouraged.

Tea-parties daily from 4 to 4.30 will be given by masters and mistresses, and by pupils to other pupils or to their elders, a time of social intercourse and polite society: the neighbouring populace will then be entertained by the youthful hosts, and courtesy and gallantry have a special chance of being adequately cultivated. After tea school will again be continued in the science hour, where each pupil will proceed to experiment under the care of an expert with the produce which he or she has been concerned with in the morning. It may be to-day that the Modern Shell are trying to discover a use for the millions of rotten bananas that are shipped into this country week by week in order to economize in produce or to discover a new fertilizer: it may be that they wish to discover how to eliminate from the water of the neighbourhood certain properties that have been found to have an evil effect on the health of the populace; once you see the bugbear, the nightmare of examination, is removed the child can occupy himself doing something really useful, something which will in all probability be, in the end, of great service to the State and at the same time train the youthful mind in the way it both wishes and ought to go.

The French period which finishes up the afternoon school will be of great use, for reminiscences will be indulged in of the last visit to a French school, village or town on the part of those members of the form who went last year, in the annual foreign tour; they will by these reminiscences, told of course in French, whet the minds of the neophytes, so that they will look forward more than ever to the holidays which will see them as a body transported to a land where so many fascinating customs may be witnessed. Conversation both in and out of school will be carried on in both German and French as much as possible, helped of course by the fact that there will be so many natives of these countries always in the school.

The evening will sometimes be spent in quiet reading, sometimes in lectures, sometimes in cinematograph shows (as a matter of fact the cinema will be very much in evidence throughout each and every day), sometimes in concerts, pianola and real, very often in theatricals; but on this particular evening of which I am speaking the Modern Shell have decided to do the English that the present-day form did in morning school before breakfast. This English period is, if anything, looked forward to more than any other period in the day.

The reason is that, in its many-sidedness, it is even perhaps more entrancing than geography. First there is the writing and editing of the form magazine, which is an intricate periodical with a daily news-sheet merging into a more serious-minded weekly, which itself turns into a monthly magazine of extraordinary bulk. News, verses, stories, long and short, novels, drawings, essays, debates, dialogues, all are heaped into this production.

Plays are written, produced and acted by each form, supervised only at the rarest intervals by the form master, parts for which are thought out and debated about spiritedly in form as part of the subject. Extracts from the great masters are discovered, learnt and declaimed by the discoverer to the rest of his confederates; everywhere and in every branch of this subject there is the fresh air and fierce pleasure of the explorer and pioneer, carving out for himself a gigantic task to be performed, disciplining himself for that task by repeated smaller undertakings. In such an atmosphere of feverish excitement and interest, is it to be wondered at that the result is so magnificent? For our youthful poetry is real poetry written in the white heat of passion, the literature of our youth is real literature written while the fire of life is still burning strongly and furiously inside. Each boy and girl finds in him or her self something that he or she must say, something sacred that must be expressed after attempts which may often be futile, volatile, fluid; at length there emanates a solid, lasting record in sentences that will ring through the world of a generation that had risen out of the slough of sullen acquiescence in an age that cared not for learning or things of the soul, to the highest heights that had ever been dreamt of by the human race, and our schools of the future had shown how nearly godlike indeed are these puny mortals when they put their shoulders to the wheel and help God to grind His mill.

So we leave our dream-children and this sketch of Utopia in the fervid hope that something of truth exists in this vision that I have seen, and the last and most fervent prayer of my life is that I may live long enough to take part in a revolution that shall make such a vision possible, and see it in the initial stages starting on its godlike course; then shall I, like Simeon, be content to depart in peace, for I shall have, in little at any rate, O God, have seen Thy salvation.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

Obvious printer errors have been corrected. Otherwise, the author's original spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been left intact.