This is the point, ‘Greek _or_ Roman’. Educational experience has shown that a school-system must be elastic and accommodate itself to the psychology and the needs of the child. Wherever there have been bilingual countries the problem has arisen. What is educationally the soundest principle of manipulating the language question? At first it was thought that the language of the higher culture should be enforced on all. It would save time and expense and trouble; moreover (so men argued), it would be in the interest of the child whose mother-tongue was thus disregarded, for he would have so much more time to learn the language of the ‘superior culture’. Your own language, they told the other party, you know already and your children need not spend time on it at school. Better, therefore, to have a uniform language throughout. Now such a course (looking at it from the educational point of view) has been proved over and over again to be utterly unsound. The verdict of history has been to uphold, even at the cost of money and time and trouble, the principle of mother-tongue instruction. You must, as Augustine implied, start with what is natural to the child. If you begin with what is strange and has no connexion with his thoughts and speech, you are merely delaying his progress. You will, no doubt, develop his memory, but his thought will remain untouched. Inspectors in the schools of South Africa have reported repeatedly the case of Dutch children who have been started on English, that they read and spell perfectly, but are quite unable to explain the meaning of an English sentence. The consequence is that they take twice as long to pass the elementary standards as they normally would. The same has been found in Quebec and in India and Burma. Teachers and missionaries everywhere have discovered that the mother-tongue principle is the only fruitful one. They have found that where it is applied progress follows in an unexpected way. Once the child has learned to use, to analyse, to understand his own language, once his thought has been set going, he will learn the second language more quickly than the child who started with the second language. He is therefore ahead in three respects: his thought has been stimulated, he has learned his own language, he has learned another language, whereas the other has not been induced to think, knows his own language superficially and the second language imperfectly. This can be substantiated by many cases from the experience of teachers in bilingual countries.