Such measures as these will be worth reams of essays in educational papers and Parents’ Reviews, worth thousands of inspiring and suggestive lectures at pedagogic conferences. If, indeed, such essays and such lectures do any good at all. The more one looks into scholastic affairs the more one is struck not only by the futility but the positive mischievousness of much of what passes for educational liberalism. The schoolmaster is criticised vehemently for teaching the one or two poor useless subjects he can in a sort of way teach, and practically nothing is done to help or equip him to teach anything else. By reason of this uproar, the world is full now of anxious muddled parents, their poor brains buzzing with echoes of Froebel, Tolstoy, Herbert Spencer, Ruskin, Herbart, Colonel Parker, Mr. Harris, Matthew Arnold, and the _Morning Post_, trying to find something better. They know nothing of what is right, they only know very, very clearly that the ordinary school is extremely wrong. They are quite clear they don’t want “cram” (though they haven’t the remotest idea what cram is), and they have a pretty general persuasion that failure at examination is a good test of a sound education. And in response to their bleating demand there grows a fine crop of Quack Schools; schools organized on lines of fantastic extravagance, in which bee-keeping takes the place of Latin, and gardening supersedes mathematics, in which boys play tennis naked to be cured of False Shame, and the numerical exercises called bookkeeping and commercial correspondence are taught to the sons of parents (who can pay a hundred guineas a year), as Commercial Science. The subjects of study in these schools come and go like the ravings of a disordered mind; “Greek History” (in an hour or so a week for a term) is followed by “Italian Literature,” and this gives place to the production of a Shakesperian play that ultimately overpowers and disorganizes the whole curriculum. Ethical lessons and the school pulpit flourish, of course. A triennial walk to a chalk-pit is Field Geology, and vague half-holiday wanderings are Botany Rambles. “Art” of the copper punching variety replaces any decent attempt to draw, and an extreme expressiveness in music compensates for an almost deliberate slovenliness of technique. Even the ladies’ seminaries of the Georgian days could scarcely have produced a parallel to the miscellaneous incapacity of the victim of these “modern” schools, and it becomes daily more necessary for those who have the interests of education at heart to disavow with the most unmistakable emphasis these catch-parent impostures.