Chapter 21 A Scheme of Educational Theory Proposed to Parents
Each Class in Society should have its Ideal––One of Mr. Matthew Arnold’s discriminating utterances may help us in the effort to define anew the scope and the methods of education. In A French Eton (page 61) he says:––’The education of each class in society has, or ought to have, its ideal, determined by the wants of that class, and by its destination. Society may be imagined so uniform that one education shall be suitable for all its members; we have not a society of that kind, nor has any European country . . . Looking at English society at this moment one may say that the ideal for the education of each of its classes to follow, the aim which the education of each should particularly endeavour to reach, is different.’
This remark, to which we can give only a doubtful assent, helps us, nevertheless, to define our position. In this matter of class differentiation we believe we have scientific grounds for a line of our own. The Fathers (why should we not have Fathers in education as well as in theology?) worked out, for the most part, their educational thought with an immediate view to the children of the poor.