The aim of education may be defined as the attempt to train men and women to understand the world they live in, so that they may be able to assist or resist the tendencies of their time in the light of ideals and standards resting on the widest possible foundation of knowledge and experience. Now, our educational history for the last hundred years has been the result of the interaction between two predominant educational types, which I may call, simply for the purposes of description, the traditional and the modern. The traditional type comes down to us (with modifications, no doubt) by a continuous history from the Middle Ages, and its chief representatives in England at the present time are those large private institutions which are called public schools, and the two older universities. The first great mark of this type of education is that in practice—whatever its theory may have been—in practice it is corporate. It has believed in educating people rather through influence than through instruction, and it has believed in educating them in direct relation to their social context and setting. Now that, in a country of aristocratic organisation, inevitably involved an exclusive and aristocratic type of education. If you have got a society stratified in layers one above the other, and you are then going to educate people in direct relation to their social context, your educational system is bound to be similarly stratified. That is inevitable, and consequently, through the social conditions of the time, the education which is most strongly corporate in tone and spirit has also tended to be aristocratic. As I have said, this method deals with people rather through influence than through instruction. Of course, it does not ignore instruction, but it is true that not very long ago I heard a very distinguished lady asked whether a certain school was what we call a public school; "Oh, yes," she replied, "it is a real public school. I mean they don’t learn anything there." The instruments which for the most part this education has used have been the great literatures of all ages, and particularly the literatures of Greece and Rome, and their civilisations. These literatures and civilisations have a great advantage over all others as instruments of education, because, while they are in many ways closely akin to our own, which are descended from them, they are complete and can be studied in their entirety. The aim of this type of education has been to bring the student’s mind into closest possible contact with the greatest minds of the human race in all ages, with the minds that have done or attempted most (in history), with the minds that have thought most accurately and deeply (in science and philosophy), with the minds that have felt most tenderly and truly (in poetry). It may, or may not, succeed in that aim. It may attempt it in the case of individual students who are particularly ill-suited