EDUCATION CHOSEN FROM THE WRITINGS OF MATTHEW ARNOLD EDITED BY LEONARD HUXLEY "A fugitive and gracious light he seeks, This does not come with houses or with gold, With place, with honour, and a flattering crew; UNIV. OF THYRSIS NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 64-66, FIFTH AVENUE 1912 PREFACE To Mr. Theodore Reunert, whose name I gratefully place first among my few words of preface, this book owes its inception, and not its inception only, but a host of practical suggestions. His own activity on the Johannesburg Council of Education, his own enthusiasm for that which is the chiefest instrument of civilisation, owed much of their inspiration to Matthew Arnold, the labourer in the field of practical education as well as the apostle of enlightenment. The inspector of English schools, the investigator of educational systems in France and Germany, in Holland, Italy and Switzerland, was a critic of educational ideas and educational methods who could appreciate the best in them while exposing their defects, and who claimed that England should not fall short of the other centres of European civilisation in making true education a national concern, in making it an organised training for the many, and not either the privilege of the few or the prey of the charlatanism and cupidity of individual speculation. Matthew Arnold long regarded himself as one crying in the wilderness. Yet in the course of years his voice has made itself heard more widely than the voice of many another who wrote on education; men perhaps so wholly identified with strictly educational work that they appealed for the most part to professional circles only. In the public eye he was not the School Inspector, but the man of letters, the champion of a high cause; he was equipped not merely with educational formulas, but with wide-ranging HARVE 241382 |