It is needless to say that if we believed that
the study of Greek were likely to disappear from the curriculum either of the great public schools or the Universities, as a consequence of the measures proposed by the Syndicate, we should un- hesitatingly vote against the adoption of the Report. It is the teaching of all history that no national life has become great unless it has been affected by the study of Greek ideals and Greek methods of thought. It would be impossible to con- template without the deepest distrust any scheme of educa- tion likely to affect the thinking classes of the country which should absolutely eliminate the influence of the work of Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato. But that is a very different matter from acquiescence in the proposition that there should be a compulsory test in a smattering of Greek exacted from all candidates for admission to the two oldest English Universities. The point lies, of course, in the word " com- pulsory " ; more than that, it lies in the word " compulsory " as applied to the knowledge of subjects expected from boys who have passed a definite age. For, up to a certain stage in the argument for the retention of Greek as a subject to be taught at schools, we are with the schoolmasters who believe that Greek is the finest educative implement to the hand of the teacher. "It encourages exact thinking ; it will allow nothing slovenly ; whether or not it succeeds in intro- ducing the learner to the highest and greatest plane of speculative philosophy that mankind has yet achieved, still it does one thing in any case,—it teaches a boy how to learn." That is the argument of the schoolmaster enthusiastic for the retention of Greek in the school curriculum, and we cannot quarrel with it ; indeed, we believe it essential that boys at school should be introduced to the study of what is, from many points of view, the greatest language of the world. But we still hold that there is no invincible reason for making some knowledge of Greek compulsory in the case of admittance or non-admittance to a University. Although the study of Greek may be the most admirable form of mental gymnastics for all boys, and although it may supply the best possible plank in the platform upon which many men have to stand in after life, yet its enforced study after a certain period of a boy's life may be injurious rather than helpful or educative. For—and it is a fact that en- lightened schoolmasters realise—there does come a time in a boy's life when the enforcement of this or that particular study, for which the boy shows you that he has no especial aptitude, has a retrograde influence rather than anything else. It may be well that the young mind, unwilling to learn what it is proposed it should learn—though, as a fact, there are few minds unwilling to learn anything—should be forced to learn something, however uncongenial. But that cannot go on for ever, and the essential point to be remembered, as we hold, is that at a stage considerably before the time when a boy is ready to be examined by a University, he has passed the season when he should be driven rather than led. A boy goes up for the entrance examination at Oxford or Cambridge when be is eighteen. By the time he is sixteen or seventeen he has either shown some aptitude for the study. of Greek, or he has not. If he has shown such aptitude, let him continue to study what will certainly prove of value to him afterwards. If he has not, let the schoolmaster try to find out if he has not some other special aptitude which it is worth while to develop. In any case, when once his young mind has passed through the gymnasium of the beginning of Greek, let him afterwards seek any other palaestra, of thought or activity that he chooses. If, so to speak, he prefers the Lancashire style of wrestling with his oppo- nents, why should he be restricted to the Doric P The object to aim at, surely, is that he should be able to throw the wrestler who opposes him, whether it be a German chemist or an American engineer.
Schoolmasters who write and speak about the giving up or the retention of Greek as compulsory in school curricula occasionally look at the question from a queerly twisted angle. It is argued, for instance—though possibly the words used are intended to convey a different meaning from that which they apparently suggest—that if Greek were elimi- nated as a subject compulsory for Responsions or the Little- go, "Greek would suffer." The words read as if the study of Greek were a kind of shop or business which must be bolstered up at all costs. But surely the convinced believer in the value of Greek as an influence on national life would have sufficient confidence in his favourite language to think— as we think—that Greek can and will take care of itself; that its influence and strength are so obvious and insistent that it cannot be, and will not be, ignored.
That is, as it seems to us, the main point. And when once it is conceded that it need not be compulsory for school- masters to drag unwilling followers over dreary bills and plains until the " thalassa " of a University career is in sight, surely the opportunities of education are widened on all sides. It is, after all, the universal complaint among schoolmasters, both at public and preparatory schools, that "there is not time" to teach everything as it ought to be taught. The preparatory-school master groans over the drawing up of a school time-table, because the public-school entrance exami- nations require proficiency—however moderate—in so large a number of subjects. Just in the same way, the public-school curriculum is hampered and burdened because the Universities insist on so wide a field of compulsory subjects. And it cannot be denied, and will not be denied even by the strongest up- holders of the study of Greek, that, as matters stand at present, a great deal goes untaught that under ideal conditions ought to be taught, and would be taught. Take, for example, the teaching of history. The firmest believer in the value of Latin and Greek, considered as mental gymnastics, might readily admit that the history of Greek and Roman wars is a less valuable subject for study than the more modern wars which have led to the present balance of power in Europe or Asia or America. Yet somehow or other it has come about that the wars described by Xenophon and Thucydides and Livy have obtained a preponderance in the mind of the latter-day schoolboy to which they have no convincing title. The wars waged between Rome and Carthage, or those in which Athenian generals were chosen by lot to command Greek armies against Eastern enemies, are no doubt ex- tremely interesting, and have had their influence on the present status of European Powers. But surely the atten- tion which has been devoted to them by the public schools is disproportionate, if the study of the battles fought by Hannibal or Alexander leads to the exclusion of the study of the wars connected with the names of Moltke, Von Roon, Grant, Jackson, and Lee ? It is not, we believe, an exaggera- tion—it certainly would not have been an exaggeration twenty years ago—to say that you could find nine schoolboys out of ten who could tell you something about the Punic Wars or the Sicilian Expedition, but who had only the haziest notion of the cause or result of the Franco-Prussian War or the war between the Northern and Southern States in America. And if that is true, it means much. It means that, from the Universities downwards, the examining authorities are not asking for the knowledge which those whom they examine ought to have and must have. The study of Greek, we are convinced, will always hold its own in English thought and work, simply because nothing that is essentially great can, under the rules of life, be disregarded. But it will help nobody to insist on cramming Greek into minds which, so to speak, cannot hold it, and which could hold something else. It is because we believe that Greek will always attract and hold a certain train of English thought that we view without dissatisfaction, but rather with approval, the "reformer's" plea that the study of Greek should not be compulsory. And after all, liberty to think and work as a man thought he should think and work, and not, necessarily, as he was directed by his teachers, was always an idea essentially Greek.
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