The general public is apt to express this feature resentfully by saying that the modern teacher "crams." Better informed critics have put it that modern education is little more than a process of "encephalisation," or the imprinting of certain facts on the child's brain almost as mechanically as the indenting of marks on the cylinder of a gramophone. Each of these criticisms implies an injustice. Educationists and teachers have, of course, discussed this very point for decades, and the present system is the formulation of their deliberate judgment. They still differ amongst themselves as to the proportion of memory-work and stimulation-work, but it is too late in the day (if accurate at all) to tell teachers that to "educate" means "to draw out" the child's "faculties," not to put in. Every elementary teacher knows that he must train the child to think as well as furnish it with positive information. The point one may legitimately raise is whether the general educational practice represents a fair adjustment of the two functions. It is essential in such disputes to have clear principles. What is the aim of education? The current phrase, "to make good citizens," is far too vague. A good citizen is, in a large employer's mind, a man who will work for two pounds a week and not annoy wealthier people by demanding more: in a clergyman's mind, one who goes to church. The point is serious and relevant, because there is a growing tendency among the middle and upper class to insist on a return to the ideal of the old Church of England school society: the children must not be educated in such a way that they will aspire above the station to which the Almighty has called them. As, however, the educationist will probably reply at once that his duty is to do all in his power to promote intelligence during such period as the State thinks advisable, we need not discuss the larger ideal of developing the child's powers on general humanitarian grounds. But glance at the manuals which are used in our schools, and consider whether we have as yet realised the true ideal of education. These manuals, and the methods employed, are the outcome of a hundred years of critical discussion, yet I venture to say that they need to be entirely rewritten. I pass over the infant-schools and earlier standards, where the first general ideas are carefully, and on the whole judiciously, implanted. As soon, however, as the child enters its teens, it is painfully overloaded with memory-work. I take, for example, the manuals of geography and history which are used in educating children of eleven in a first-class London secondary school. They are crammed with information which will never be of the least use to one man in ten thousand, and which we have no right whatever to impose on the young brain with so much necessary work to do.