It is true that in all the Public Schools a certain amount of informal education is done through the medium of Musical Societies, Natural History Societies, Debating Societies, School Magazines, and the like; that the discipline of a Public School, with its system of School and House prefects, has considerable educational value; that the playing fields do something towards the formation of character; that the boys, by exchanging experiences and discussing things freely among themselves, help to educate one another; and that during the four months of each year which the schoolboy spends away from school, he is, or may be, exposed to educative influences of various kinds.[29] But the broad fact remains that the _studies_ of the youthful graduate, whether in school classroom or college lecture-room, have been wholly unformative and therefore wholly uneducative.
But let us consider the education given in our Public Schools and Universities, at what is presumably the highest of all its levels.
Let us see what is done for the boys who have sufficient ability to win Scholarships and read for Honours at Oxford and Cambridge.

It is to the supposed interests of these brighter boys that the vital interests of their duller schoolfellows are perforce sacrificed.

Are the results worth the sacrifice?
The brighter boys fall into two main groups,--those who have a turn for the "Humanities," and those who have a turn for Mathematics and Science.

Where the "Humanities" are effectively taught,--where, for example, the scholar is allowed to pass through the portals of Latin and Greek grammar and composition into the wonder-world that lies beyond them,--the _communicative_ instinct receives a valuable training.

It is, unfortunately, quite possible for a boy, or even for a man, to be what is called a "good scholar," and yet to take no interest whatever in the history or literature of Greece and Rome; and the examination system undoubtedly tends to foster this bastard type of humanism.