As for the elementary schools which remain faithful, as so many still do, to the traditions of the old regime,--if in these any of the seven qualities manage to resist the adverse influences to which they are all exposed, they have at best but a starved and stunted life.
I have spoken much and with unsparing frankness of the shortcomings of our elementary schools.

The time has come for me to say with emphasis that however grave and however numerous may be the defects of elementary education in England, they are defects which it shares with all other branches of education, and which England shares with all other Western lands.

The plain truth is that education as such is a failure in the West, a failure in the sense that the very qualities which it ought to foster--the cardinal virtues, mental, moral, and spiritual, which are present in embryo in every child, waiting to be realised--are not merely neglected by it, in its insane ardour for "results," but are also exposed, in most of its schools, to strongly adverse influences.

And the reason why education as such is a failure in the West is that from its earliest days it has been a house divided against itself, those who were and are responsible for it having been under the influence of two mutually destructive assumptions, which they have vainly tried to reconcile with one another.
The first of these assumptions is my initial "truism,"-- that the function of education is to foster growth.

This is admitted, implicitly if not directly, by all who think and speak about education, and even, in their unguarded moments, by most of those who teach.