However, it is sometimes impossible for parents to manage home education, though in London there are so many opportunities, that it must be more a case of must than can’t, for there are Westminster, St. Paul’s, and the University College Schools, all of which can be managed after the boys are old enough to be trusted in the streets alone, and at the latter of which for the absurdly low fee of 8_l._ 8_s._ a quarter can be had the best education in the world, but where the boys need learn very little if they can scrape through the day’s routine without finding themselves in either the ‘black’ or the ‘appearing’ books; but even then they do not learn as little as they can if they try at either Eton or Harrow, where it seems to me the education given is especially useless for practical service, and can never by any chance fit the recipient for any real work that he may have to undertake.
The perfect education should be that which most fits a man for his work, and no one can watch the manner in which we are being ousted by Germans from every place without allowing that their education has something which ours lacks, and that unless our boys can be taught to emulate their patience, perseverance, and eager quest after knowledge, to say nothing of their capabilities of existing on a pittance, we shall wake up some day to find our lads quite out of the running, because they do not understand life properly, and because they are unable to fight for themselves against the present overwhelming German invasion. There is a limpness, a passiveness about the boys of the present day that is something dreadful, and that I think springs in some measure from these fatal examinations, and the fearsome higher education. They see the prizes can only fall to the exceptionally gifted and hard-working members of the fraternity, and therefore they are dispirited before they start, knowing that, try as they may, they can never succeed. Far from stimulating most youths to work, the sense that unless they are geniuses they cannot pass the exams cripples them, and they cease to care to try for what they know they cannot possibly obtain, read how they may; and therefore I cannot but think the excessively high standard that must be reached nowadays in everything is a mistake, and that serious consideration should be given both to this and to the fact that our boys are not able to compete with the Germans because something in our scheme of education and learning does not permit them to do so successfully.