I believe that in the University Tutorial Classes organised by the Workers’ Educational Association you will find upon the whole the soundest educational principles which are at this moment operative anywhere in England. The classes choose their own subjects, and, as a general rule, they choose those subjects about which nobody knows the truth. Those are always the best instruments of education; for if anyone knows the truth, he has only to say what it is and his hearers believe him. That may be instruction, but it is not education. Real education is always best conducted as a joint search for truth; and in these Tutorial Classes we have, not one teacher and thirty hearers, but thirty-one fellow students, one of whom has commenced the study earlier than the rest, and can therefore act as guide.
These are wide-reaching problems; and, indeed, there is no limit to the range of the influence of education. It is the supreme regenerative force. What is the chief obstacle of all who work for progress in any department of life? Always the apathy of those whom we especially wish to help. And why are they apathetic? Simply because they have had no opportunity of finding out what is the life from which they are excluded. But open by the merest chink the door of that treasure-house wherein are contained the garnered stores of literature and science, of history and art, and they will be foremost in demanding that they shall no longer be excluded from the birthright of the sons of civilisation. These are the good things of which no one is deprived because another possesses them; they are the true social goods of which possession by one redounds to the enrichment of all. It is the taste of them that can most stimulate the zeal for progress; and as it supplies the motive power, so it supplies also the directive wisdom. The perfecting and expansion of our education is just what is most vital for social progress to-day, and for the establishment of real justice in our social life, for it alone can bring within the reach of all that knowledge which is at once the source of power and the guarantee that the power shall be beneficent.
The position taken in the text of these lectures might be summarised as follows: It is the living body which gives authority to its Orders; it is not the possession of valid Orders which gives authority to the body. In support of this view I have the kind permission of Dr. Headlam to quote the following from his article—"Notes on Reunion: The Kikuyu Conference," in the _Church Quarterly Review_ for January, 1914.