The two great needs in education are enthusiasm and personality, enthusiasm in the pupil and personality in the teacher. Personality is the great wizard who can produce water from stones and gold mines from sand. It would be better to learn skittles from a great man than all the graces in the world from a mere practitioner of knowledge. No system is bad enough to withstand the electric influence of personality, and none is so good that it will succeed if there is no personality to give it life. We have strong characters in England: it is a matter in which we flatter ourselves that we are not behind the rest of the world: yet so often our schoolmasters and schoolmistresses seem to be inanimate beings, mere machines for hearing lessons, setting papers and giving marks. Those to whom learning has been a perfunctory business bear the signs of it all their lives. There are too many of them, and the majority of them are women. They are the people who care to know nothing for its own sake; they regard the suggestion that one could read any book but a light novel as humorous; there is no subject that they can discuss intelligently or with any sign of original reflection. Where they so far rouse themselves as to express views, the views will be nothing but the expression of their appetites, desires and prejudices given by the particular penny paper which they read. They have no interests outside housekeeping, and they don’t take the trouble to do even that scientifically. One sees them in shoals in teashops and on beaches, with their cheap novel in their hand and a vaguely discontented look upon their faces. Their discontent is not surprising, for how can anyone be contented who has never taken a lively interest in anything but food and clothing? If little Alice’s mother lets her become as one of these she is cruelly betraying a sacred trust: she is doing her best to turn the living thing to which she gave birth into a dead one. If she has not the personality herself to turn Alice’s enthusiasms, about which there will be no doubt at all, to good account, then let her have the sense to look for somebody who has.