Consider in what that educational process has consisted.  Its backbone has been the teaching of Latin by men who can read, write, and speak it rather worse than a third-rate Babu speaks English, and of Ancient Greek by teachers who at best half know this fine lost language.  They do not expect any real mastery of either tongue by their students, and naturally, therefore, no real mastery is ever attained.  The boys and young men just muff about at it for three times as long as would be needed to master completely both those tongues if they had “live” teachers, and so they acquire habits of busy futility and petty pedantry in all intellectual processes that haunt them throughout life.  There are also sterile mathematical studies that never get from “exercises” to practice.  There is a pretence of studying philosophy based on Greek texts that few of the teachers and none of the taught can read comfortably, and a certain amount of history.  The Modern History School at Oxford, for example, is the queerest collection of chunks of reading.  English history from the beginning, with occasional glances at Continental affairs, European history for about a century, bits of economics, and—­the Politics of Aristotle!  It is not education; it is a jack-daw collection....This sort of jumble has been the essentials of the more pretentious type of “higher education” available in Great Britain up to the present.

In this manner, through all the most sensitive and receptive years of life, our boys have been trained in “how not to get there,” in a variety of disconnected subjects, by men who have never “got there,” and it would be difficult to imagine any curriculum more calculated to produce a miscellaneous incompetence.  They have also, it happens, received a certain training in savoir faire through the collective necessities of school life, and a certain sharpening in the arts of advocacy through the debating society.  Except for these latter helps, they have had to face the world with minds neither more braced, nor more trained, nor more informed than any “uneducated” man’s.

Surely the first condition that should be laid down for the new education in Europe is that whatever is undertaken must be undertaken in grim earnest and done.  It is ridiculous to talk about the “character-forming” value of any study that does not go through to an end.  Manifestly Greek must be dropped as a part of the general curriculum for a highly educated man, for the simple reason that now there are scarcely any competent teachers, and because the sham of teaching it partially and pretentiously demoralises student and school alike.  The claim of the clergy and so forth to “know” Greek is one of the many corrupting lies in British intellectual life.  English comic writers never weary of sneering at the Hindu who claimed to be a “failed B.A.,” but what is the ordinary classical degree man of an English university but a “failed” Greek scholar?  Latin, too, must be either reduced to the position of a study supplementary to the native tongue, or brought up to an honest level of efficiency.