From the mass who show a satisfactory result at the end of the Schooling process, the functional manhood and womanhood of our peoples have to be developed, and we have now to discuss the nature of the second phase of education, the phase that should be the mental parallel and accompaniment of physical adolescence in all the citizens who are to count for strength in the state. There is a break in the whole development of the human being at this age, and it may very well be paralleled by a break in methods and subjects of instruction. In Great Britain, in the case of the wealthier classes, schooling and puerile discipline is prolonged altogether too far, largely through the gross incapacity of our secondary teachers. These men are unable, boring away day after day, week after week, year after year, with vain repetitions, imbecile breaks and new beginnings, through all the vast period from eleven or twelve until twenty, to achieve that mastery of Latin and Greek which was once the necessary preliminary to education, and which has become at last, through the secular decline in scholastic energy and capacity due to the withdrawal of interest in these studies, the unattainable educational ideal. These classical pedagogues, however, carry the thing up to three or four and twenty in the Universities—though it is inconceivable that any language spoken since the antediluvian age of leisure, can need more than ten years to learn—and if they could keep the men until forty or fifty they would still be fumbling away at the keys to the room that was ransacked long ago. But with educated men as teachers and practical handbooks to help, and practical examiners to guide them, there is no reason whatever why the great mass of the linguistic training of the citizen, in the use of his own and any other necessary language, should not be done for good and all by fourteen, why he should not have a fairly complete mastery of form and quantity through mathematical training and drawing, and why the way should not be clear and immediate for the development of that adult mental edifice of which this is the foundation.
By fourteen the power of abstract reasoning and of an analytical treatment of things is in existence, the learner is now less to be moulded