Izaak Walton, Thoreau, Fabre, Jefferies, and others more than I had heard of.

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How easy it will be for the classical teachers to see this aspect of our case and to appreciate the argument against young boys specializing particularly in science, when there is so much of the general still to be compassed as nature study. But how difficult it will be for them to accept the "tu quoque," or rather the " et tu Brute," when we remind them that English is not only available for general study, but even contains a fair literature of its own; and that it does not require four or five years of arduous study before the pupil can read this our mother tongue for what it has to convey to him, whether in content or in style.

But indeed it is not surprising if teachers of Latin and Greek still feel themselves justified in plugging away at ancient tongues for the sake of imparting a reflected glow of culture upon the very few who ever learn to read in those tongues. For do but observe what our teachers of English are doing. English having been elevated to the dignity of a subject in English schools, must at once be surrounded by difficulties and set about with entanglements, in order that there may be something to teach; that is to say, according to a subject teacher's view, some barrier between the pupil and his normal objective. The fact that the boys of a secondary school have already a considerable familiarity with their mother tongue should be seized upon by the teacher of English as a great opportunity to be rid of subject limitations. He should be able immediately to read the classics of English literature with the boys. Boys of twelve in a secondary school know enough English to understand all that is needful for a due appreciation of many of the English classics. In fact, even if we restrict ourselves to the very first rank of English poets and prosewriters there are more books to be read than any boy could read with profitable study, even if he did nothing else but read English in his school-time.* Boys of twelve in a secondary

* The statement is so obviously true that no instances are really required. But the following should occur to every teacher as representing literature of the very best within the comprehension of boys of twelve: Malory, Berners' " Froissart," North's " Plutarch," the Bible, Mandeville,

school, also, know enough English to make good lectures and straightway to write fair prose, poems, and even plays. On the very day the boys come to school they have far more knowledge of and power in English than most of them will ever have in any other tongue. Teachers of Greek, Latin, French, and German are handicapped. There must (according to our present system) be years of toilsome language study before the literature of these can even be read with comfort, or the language used freely and beautifully as a medium of expression. But does the teacher of English use this advantage? Not he. As a conventional schoolmaster he has it so stuck in his mind that everything in school is a subject to be learnt that he apes the teachers of more difficult and unfamiliar subjects, vies with the Latin master in teaching grammar; affects to believe that English still has cases, a subjunctive mood, and the other effete paraphernalia of parsing; and when all else fails, and the boys really have come at the content, he makes them translate the sense of a passage out of that glorious medium which makes it literature into journalese or current schoolmaster. I believe that if the eating of apples were appointed to be taught in schools some special course of study would immediately spring up which would make it impossible for a playboy to get a really satisfactory bite, and to know the flavour of apples, until at least a year's course had been completed. In that case I should be a firm supporter of the robbing of orchards.

When one directly charges schoolmasters with wasting time, effort, and latent interest in teaching subjects in such a way that they have no appeal to the boys and no clear connexion with life as it is understood by the outside world, the earnest men among them, those who have really thought about their work in relation to life, are apt to make the following reply: "The duty of a school is to teach the highest things; to give the boys a general outlook of an Hakluyt, about a fourth part of Shakespeare, Bunyan, the Ballads, some of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century essayists, novelists such as Defoe, Dickens, Scott, selections from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold. The list, of course, is endless. Yet this is only what is fit for boys of twelve to appreciate at once. Ten years later they should still be reading the same writers as well as those they had taken up in the senior standards.

exalted kind, which will serve as a guide for them in the lesser practical affairs of daily life; to set an ideal before them towards which they may work, whatever their daily sphere of life may be later on." While one smiles at the naïve vagueness of this claim, they come out with an emphatic answer to what they fancy is the case against them: "You seem to think that it is the business of schoolmasters so to teach that the boys, at the end of their school course, will be fully qualified merchants, engineers, architects, lawyers, soldiers, journalists, grocers, and so on." So far as the present school system goes any attempt at a definite vocational training is, of course, a great mistake. But I think it would be wise so to modify the present school system that a course of training would be possible which would render the boys thoroughly efficient in certain methods and disciplines which are common to all of these callings. But we are more concerned to challenge the positive part of the statement just quoted. Do we claim "to give the boys a general outlook"? To how many of the boys under our care can we as subject teachers claim to have given a general outlook? Possibly to that same four or five out of twenty-five to whom we really manage to teach Latin or history or English literature. Certainly we cannot have given a general outlook to the rest, for we can only claim the ultimate benefit of our teaching for those whom we really teach.

And then consider those words "something to serve as a guide." Surely a guide is one who goes with you and shows the way and not a mere bunch of theoretical directions and recommendations. Rules which are taught before examples are encountered must be taught again afterwards if they are ever to be learnt. In the process of learning there should be at least as much of practice as of instruction, and the theory and practice of a study must be united in education. Even if all our schools actually did inspire their pupils with noble aim, and a zeal for high endeavour (which is far from being the case), we should still be no nearer to the real function of the school, namely, the training of boys and girls to take their places in the world. It is not enough for the school to have given the pupil an ideal outlook and a thorough knowledge. Cf. Perse Playbooks, No. 4. p. 36.

of Latin and Greek, or science or mathematics or modern languages (quite apart from the fact that to most pupils the school gives neither the one nor the other, neither the ideal outlook nor the thorough knowledge of a special subject). If we are agreed that education should be a preparation for life, the pupils must have some practice at life. This it could be made possible for them to do under encouragement and due guidance by the establishment of the little school States we propose. And the method of education would then become truly Play in the best sense of the word, in the sense of lifepractice, a making ready for that world game which is to follow.

Some teachers may remind us that not all our pupils are destined to be practical performers in the busy world. There must be the man of wisdom, they will say, as well as the man of action. Assuredly; and if we allow boys to develop in a natural way, encouraging rather than repressing the growth of their minds, we shall presently observe in one boy a tendency in one direction and in another boy a tendency in another direction. But during the school period, during the years that are devoted to his training, every boy should study both the wisdom to know and the skill to do. This "union of thought and conduct in a life of action guided by reason " is not the invention of any modern educational reformers. It was the ideal of the Greeks. But our learned friends, who have been in charge of education in England ever since the days of the Renaissance, have long since repudiated the Greek system. For, look you, they give the most of a boy's school-time to the study of ancient languages.

CONCLUSION

THE final pages of this book really embody more of promise than of conclusion; for in the foregoing chapters we have only been demonstrating how the Play Way may be applied in the classroom itself, or as a partial liberation from it in schools where the curriculum is based on classroom practice. But if we are ever to bring the Play Way fully into being we require no less than a Little Commonwealth devoted to that end, a commonwealth unhampered on the one hand by the relics of obsolete systems, or on the other by the fear of adopting new methods not yet perfected. Such a school, with a sketch of its curriculum and time-table, of its studies, games, sports, and festivals and even of the dress of the boys and girls-had been discussed in the final chapter, since cancelled because the subject required a book to itself. And so, if any of my readers has anticipated in this conclusion to be presented with some charming ideal picture of daily life as we conceive it would be in a school run entirely on Play Way lines, he must, I fear, be disappointed.

For the past ten years, all the good I have seen in life or have been able to learn from books-whether in music, in poetry, in scholarship, in handicraft, in social life, or in the simple joys of children—has been to me stone upon stone in building up that ideal republic in my fancy. Whenever I have seen boys and girls playing happily or working well I have imagined they must be citizens of my Play School. Whenever I have spoken seriously with any man or woman I have told them of my dream. Even the invigoration of a frosty morning, or the enchantment of the moon at night, have always made me think : Here is gone by another morning or another evening which might have been made some occasion of good hap in the Play School. The one thing upon which