The Nation's Need: Chapters on Education. Edited by Spenser Wilkinson.
(A. Constable and Co. 8s.)—The editor has given, it is clear, something of a free hand to his contributors. The reader of Mr. Marvin's essay on "The Elementary School" will be moved, not perhaps to optimism, but certainly to hope. But what will he feel when he has reached the end of Mr. Graham Wallas's bitterly sarcastic account of "Local and Central Government—their Rela- tion in Education"? Nothing less, if he takes it all in, than that there is, and probably will continue to be, a hopeless muddle. Possibly Mr. Wallas's satire may serve a good end, but it scarcely has the character of helpfulness and instructiveness which we find in the other essays. It is impossible for us to criticise them singly. Each might well be made the subject of a special notice. We may quote, however, from Mr. Spenser Wilkinson's own essay on military education. "The strong point of the public schools is the public life in them, the discipline, the games, the tradition of good form. Its [? their] weak point is that they do not implant in the ordinary boy the love of knowledge, the love of learning, the will and the habit of education." And it is from the class of the "ordinary boy" that the officers of the Army are drawn. Of course, education is a larger thing than instruction; but boys who are not instructed cannot be educated. The training of the boy who knows that he came to school to learn certain things and that he does not learn them has a fatal defect.
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