IX. THE ORGANIZATION OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION

When we digressed to the general question of the political, social, and moral atmosphere in which the English-speaking citizen develops, we left the formal education of the average child, whose development threads through these papers and holds them together, at about the age of fifteen and at the end of the process of Schooling. We have now to carry on that development to adult citizenship. It is integral in the New Republican idea that the process of Schooling, which is the common atrium to all public service, should be fairly uniform throughout the social body, that although the average upper-class child may have all the advantages his conceivably better mental inheritance, his better home conditions, and his better paid and less overworked teachers may give him, there shall be no disadvantages imposed upon the child of any class, there shall be no burking of the intellectual education for any purpose whatever. To keep poor wretches in serfdom on the land by depriving them of all but the most rudimentary literary education, as a very considerable element in the new Nature Study Movement certainly intends, is altogether antagonistic to New Republican ideas, and there must be no weeding out of capable and high-minded teachers by filtering them through grotesque and dishonouring religious tests—dishonouring because compulsory, whatever the real faith of the teacher may be. And at the end of the Schooling period there must begin a process of sorting in the mass of the national youth—as far as possible, regardless of their social origins—that will go on throughout life. For the competition of public service must constitute the Battle for Existence in the civilized state. All-round inferiority in school life—failure not simply at this or that or at the total result (which, indeed, may be due very often to the lopsidedness