At its second best, this costly education fosters the growth of the _inquisitive_ instinct,--a grandly expansive instinct when trained in conjunction with the others, but one which is constrictive rather than expansive when trained by itself and for its own sake.

At its ordinary level, it trains no instinct whatever, and is therefore unworthy of the name of education.

Why should this be so?
Why should a course of education which lasts so long and costs so much do so little for its victims, and do that little so badly or, at any rate, so inadequately?
Because from first to last it has looked outward instead of inward; because it has laboured unceasingly to produce "results," and has never given a thought to growth.[33] Let us now go to the other end of the social scale.

What the path of self-realisation might do for the children of the "upper classes" if they were allowed to follow it, we may roughly calculate, partly by measuring what the alternative scheme of education has failed to do for them, partly by reminding ourselves of what the path has done for the village children of Utopia.

The children of the "upper classes" have such an advantage over the children of Utopia in the matter of environment,--to say nothing of inherited capacity,--that one would expect the path to do much more for their mental development than it has done for the mental development of the Utopians, especially as they could afford to remain much longer in the first and most important of its stages, the stage of self-education (in the more limited sense of the word).