Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI REAL EDUCATION—A SOLDIER TO THE RESCUE There are those who help us to guess aright. In the nineteenth century Herbert Spencer was the master of them—a cloistered bachelor and a priori thinker, typical in many respects of the eccentric philosopher, and yet the very master of practice in education. In the twentieth century a famous soldier takes up his task in turn, and becomes the greatest educator of our time. The Boy-Scout movement.—This movement is only some five years old, but it is rapidly conquering the world. Its development is, in my judgment, the greatest step towards the progress of eugenics since 1909. Scouting goes right down to the fundamental and general instincts of boyhood. The staggering contrast between its results, where you will, and those of what we are pleased to call " national education" depends upon its recognition of the primary necessity which Herbert Spencer long ago laid down for all education that is to succeed. The first and indispensable need, he said, is that the teacher shall understand the psychology of the taught. In national education, men have hitherto assumed that boys—and girls !—are simply small and ill-informed men. We have dispensed information copiously, at intervals applying an emetic called an examination, whereat what we have crammed the children with is returned, unchanged by any digestive process, upon sheets of paper which we later con and appraise. Then, on all sides, is raised the cry that intelligent young people, with initiative and adaptability and disciplined minds, are not to be had, that young wives cannot cook or housekeep, and that young mothers slay their first-born with the best intentions. In 1870, at the beginning of national education, Ruskin declared that education was a good thing, but that fi...