This physics course would cover an experimental quantitative treatment of the electric current, it would glance in an explanatory way at many of the phenomena of physical geography, and it would be correlated with a study of the general principles of chemistry. A detailed knowledge of chemical compounds is not a part of general education, it keeps better in reference books than in the non-specialized head, and it is only the broad conceptions of analysis and combination, and of the relation of energy to chemical changes, that have to be attained. Beyond this, and the application of map drawing to give accurate ideas and to awaken interest in geography and history, it is open to discussion whether any Fact subject need be taught as schooling at all. Ensure the full development of a man's mental capacity, and he will get his Fact as he needs it. And if his mind is undeveloped he can make no use of any fact he has. The subject called "Human Physiology" may be at once dismissed as absurdly unsuitable for school use. One is always meeting worthy people who "don't see why children should not know something about their own bodies," and who are not apparently aware that the medical profession after some generations of fairly systematic inquiry knows remarkably little. Save for some general anatomy, it is impossible to teach school-children anything true about the human body, because the explanation of almost any physiological process demands a knowledge of physical and chemical laws much sounder and subtler than the average child can possibly attain. And as for botany, geology, history, and geography (beyond the range already specified), these are far better relegated to the school library and the initiative of each child. Every child has its specific range of interest, and its specific way of regarding things. In geology, for example, one boy may be fascinated by the fossil hunting, another will find his interest in the effects of structure in scenery, and a third, with more imagination, will give his whole mind to the reconstruction of the past, and will pore over maps of Pleistocene Europe and pictures of Silurian landscape with the keenest appreciation. Each will be bored, or at least not greatly interested, by what attracts the others. Let the children have an easily accessible library—that is the crying need of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand schools to-day, a need every school- seeking parent may do something to remedy—and in that library let there be one or two good densely illustrated histories, illustrated travels, bound volumes of such a publication as Newnes' Wide World Magazine (I name these publications haphazard—there are probably others as good or better), Hutchinson and Co.'s Living Animals of the World, the Rev. H. N. Hutchinson's Extinct Monsters, the Badminton volumes on big game shooting, mountaineering, and yachting, Kerner's "Botany," collections of "The Hundred Best Pictures" sort, collections of views of towns and of scenery in different parts of the world, and the like. Then let the schoolmaster set aside five hours a week as the minimum for reading, and let the pupils read during that time just whatever they like, provided only that they keep silence and read. If the schoolmaster or schoolmistress comes in at all here, it should be to stimulate systematic reading occasionally by setting a group of five or six pupils to "get up" some particular subject—a report on "animals that might still be domesticated," for example—and by showing them conversationally how to read with a slip of paper at hand, gathering facts. This sort of thing it is impossible to reduce to method and system, and, consequently, it is the proper field for the teacher's initiative. It is largely in order to leave time and energy for this that I am anxious to reduce the more rigorous elements in schooling to standard and text-book.
Now all this schooling need not take more than twenty hours a week for its backbone or hard-work portion, its English, mathematics, science, and exact drawing, and twelve hours a week for its easier, more individual employments of sketching, painting, and reading, and this leaves a large margin of time for military drill and for physical exercises. If we are to get the best result from the child's individuality, we must leave a large portion of that margin at the child's own disposal, it must be free to go for walks, to "muck about," as schoolboys say, to play games, and (within limits) to consort with companions of its own choosing—to follow its interests in short. It is in this direction that British middle-class education fails most signally at the present time. The English schoolboy and schoolgirl are positively hunted through their days. They do not play—using the word to indicate a spontaneous employment into which imagination enters—at all. They have games, but they are so regulated that the imagination is eliminated; they have exercises of various stereotyped sorts. They are taken to and fro to these things in the care of persons one would call ushers unhesitatingly were it not that they also pretended to teach. The rest of their waking time is preparation or supervised reading or walking under supervision. Their friendships are watched. They are never, never left alone. The avowed ideal of many boarding schoolmasters is to "send them to bed tired out." Largely this is due to a natural dread of accidents and scrapes, that will make trouble for the school, but there is also another cause. If I may speak frankly and entirely as an unauthoritative observer, I would say it is a regrettable thing that so large a proportion of British secondary schoolmasters and mistresses are unmarried. The normal condition of a healthy adult is marriage, and for all those who are not defective upon this side (and that means an incapacity to understand many things) celibacy is a state of unstable equilibrium and too often a quite unwholesome condition. Wherever there are celibate teachers I am inclined to suspect a fussiness, an unreasonable watchfulness, a disposition to pry, an exaggeration of what are called "Dangers," a painful idealization of "Purity." It is a part of the normal development of the human being to observe with some particularity certain phenomena, to entertain certain curiosities, to talk of them to trusted equals—never, be it noted, except by perversion to parents or teachers—and there is not the slightest harm in these quite natural things, unless they are forced back into an abashed solitude or associated by suggestion with conceptions of shame and disgust. That is what happens in too many of our girls' schools and preparatory schools to-day, and it is to that end mainly that youthful intimacies are discouraged, youthful freedom is restricted, and imagination and individuality warped and crippled. It is astonishing how much of their adolescence grown-up people will contrive to forget.