And a third section will man the higher grades of the Home, Colonial, and Indian Civil Services.

Teachers, legislators, administrators,--if there are any walks in life in which cynicism and a capacity for merely destructive criticism are out of place, and in which imagination and sympathy are imperatively demanded, they are these three; and it is nothing short of a national calamity that these great and commanding professions should be manned, in part at least, by men whose mission in life is to paralyse rather than to vitalise, to fetter rather than to set free.
The further pity of it is that the training of these "intellectuals" might easily have taken an entirely different course.

Much of the specialising which goes on in our Great Public Schools and Universities, and which is so destructive of mental and spiritual vitality, is wholly unnecessary.

The course of education which the sons of the "upper classes" go through has this in common with elementary education, that in neither case need "utilitarian" considerations weigh with the teachers.

The parents of a large proportion of our Public School boys can afford to give their sons a _liberal_ education (in the truest and fullest sense of the word) up to the age of twenty-two or twenty-three; and in the case of these boys, at any rate, the excessive specialisation which makes their education so illiberal is done, not in response to the demands of professions (such as the medical or the engineering) which necessitate early specialising, but solely in response to the demands of an examination system which we adopted before we had begun to ask ourselves what education meant, and which, partly from the force of habit and partly because it is in keeping with our general attitude towards life, we still bow down before with a devotion as ardent and as irrational as that which inspired the cry of "Great is Diana of the Ephesians."[32] At its best, then, the education given by the Great Public Schools and Universities fosters the growth of one of the expansive instincts,--the _communicative_, a mighty instinct which opens up to imagination and sympathy the whole wide world of human life; but because it leaves all the other expansive instincts untended, it gives that one instinct an inadequate and unsymmetrical training, a training which checks the growth of the very faculties--imagination and sympathy--of which the instinct is largely compounded and for the sake of which it may almost be said to exist.