II. SOME SPECIMENS OF EXAMINATION WORK DONE IN A SCHOOL IN WHICH THE PUPILS ARE EDUCATED UPON BOOKS AND THINGS, 271 III. WHAT A CHILD SHOULD KNOW AT TWELVE, 300 IV. EXAMINATION OF A CHILD OF TWELVE ON THE WORK OF A TERM, 302 V. HOW ORAL LESSONS ARE USED, 329 INDEX, 360 School Education CHAPTER I DOCILITY AND AUTHORITY IN THE HOME AND THE SCHOOL =Better Relations between Children and their Elders.=—All of us who have accepted education as our _métier_ are keenly alive to the signs of the times as they are to be read in the conduct and manners of children. Upon one thing, anyway, we may congratulate ourselves with unmixed satisfaction: the relations between children and parents, and indeed between children and their grown-up friends generally, are far more intimate, frank and friendly than such relations used to be. There does not seem to be any longer that great gulf fixed between child thought and grown-up thought, which the older among us once tried to cross with frantic but vain efforts. The heads of the house, when we were little, were autocratic as the Czars of all the Russias. We received everything at their hands, from bread and milk to mother’s love, with more or less gratitude, but with invariable docility. If they had stubborn questionings as to whether was better for us, this or that, they kept them to themselves. For us, everything was decreed, and all decrees were final. There were rebellious children, perhaps, as one in a score, or one in a hundred, but then these were rebellious with the fine courage of Milton’s Satan: they dared everything and set themselves up in bold opposition. These were the open rebels who would, sooner or later, come to a bad end; so we were told and so we secretly believed. For the others, there was no middle course. They were brought under rule, and that rule was arbitrary and without appeal.