own country as is useful for the understanding of its institutions and monuments, could be imparted in less time, with more interest, and with far greater profit. The patriotic sham deeply vitiates our scheme of instruction and makes the training of the child scandalously one-sided and exacting. Germany has recently shown us the pernicious results of this political perversion of education.
Passing to the moral education of children, we at once find it cruelly distorted and enfeebled by a religious sham of the least defensible nature. Such moralists as Kant and Emerson hardly exaggerated the human importance of moral law, however much they failed to understand its human significance. Character is the pivot on which life turns. The general diffusion of fine qualities of character would transform the earth, quite apart from economic and political reform, and lead to a speedier settlement of our industrial and international difficulties. It is therefore of supreme importance to train the will or character of the child from its earliest years. Yet there is no other branch of our education, and hardly any other branch of our life, in which we tolerate so crude and ludicrous a pretence of work.
The education authority of the Metropolis of England would, one supposes, have the advantage of the finest expert advice in the world. Enter one of the thousands of schools under its control, however, and ask how the training of character is conducted. A teacher informs you that at college
