He began by
supposing that a good primary education had already been received.
"Such an education should enable an average boy of fifteen or
sixteen to read and write his own language with ease and
accuracy, and with a sense of literary excellence derived from
the study of our classic writers; to have a general acquaintance
with the history of his own country and with the great laws of
social existence; to have acquired the rudiments of the physical
and psychological sciences, and a fair knowledge of elementary
arithmetic and geometry. He should have obtained an acquaintance
with logic rather by example than by precept; while the
acquirement of the elements of music and drawing should have been
a pleasure rather than work."
He had not much to say for secondary or intermediate education, partly
because at that time, in England at least, the secondary schools were
in a hopeless state of incapacity, and differed from primary schools
not only in their greater expense, their adaptation to the
class-spirit which demanded the separation of the boys of the upper
and middle classes from those in the lower ranks of society, but
chiefly in the futility of the education given at the majority of
them.
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