§ 112. What about the education of the other “nation,” a nation of which the verb “to rule” has for many centuries been used in the passive voice, but can be used in that voice no longer? A century ago, with the partial exception of Scotland and Massachusetts, there was no such thing as school education for the people to be found anywhere in Europe or America. But from 1789 onwards power has been passing more and more from the few to the many; and as a natural consequence folk-schools (for which we have not yet found a name) have become of vast importance everywhere. The Germans, as we have seen, have been the disciples of Pestalozzi, and their elementary education in everything bears traces of his ideas. The English have organised a great system of elementary education in total ignorance of Pestalozzi. As usual, we seem to have supposed that the right system would come to us “in sleep.” But has it come? The children of the poor are now compelled by the law to attend an elementary school. What sort of an education has the law there provided for them? The Education Department professes to measure everything by results. Let us do the same. Suppose that on his leaving school we wished to forecast a lad’s future. What should we try to find out about him? No doubt we should ask what he knew; but this would not be by any means the main thing. His skill would interest us, and still more would his state of health. But what we should ask first and foremost is this, Whom does he love? Whom does he admire and imitate? What does he care about? What interests him? It is only when the answers to these questions are satisfactory, that we can think hopefully of his future; and it is only in so far as the school-course has tended to make the answers satisfactory, that it deserves our approval. Schools such as Pestalozzi designed would have thus deserved our approval; but we cannot say this of the schools into which the children of the English poor are now driven. In these schools the heart and the affections are not thought of, the powers of neither mind nor body are developed by exercise, and the children do not acquire any interests that will raise or benefit them. § 113. An advocate of our system would not deny this, but would probably say, “The question for us to consider is, not what is the best that in the most favourable circumstances might be attempted, but what is the best that in very restricted and by no means favourable circumstances, we are likely to get. The teachers in our schools are not self-devoting Pestalozzis, but only ordinary men and women, and still worse, ordinary boys and girls.[171] It would be of no use talking to our teachers (still less our pupil-teachers) about developing the affections and the mental or bodily powers of the children. All such talk could end in nothing but silly cant. As for character, we expect the school to cultivate in the children habits of order, neatness, industry. Beyond this we cannot go.”