The success of the old public schools for their own purposes, the ...

The success of the old public schools for their own purposes, the downward and outward extension of their notions and observances, had given this ideal a wide diffusion throughout English society.

But the public schools were designed rather for a governing than an administrative class, for an aristocracy than for a clerisy, and while an aristocracy can live a long while on its conventions, it is the business of a clerisy to keep all conventions under review, to maintain an informed and critical resistance against the propagandist, the advertiser and all other agents of the mass-mind. The charge against the higher education of the Late Victorian age is that it surrendered the freedom it was meant to guard.

In a world of exact progressive knowledge, where the foundations not of belief only but of daily habit were perishing, the public schools overstressed and standardized ideals which were becoming inadequate to the conduct of modern life, and they did not adjust the balance by breadth of observation or fineness of reasoning.

They preserved, indeed, some of the most precious things of the past: not untruly can the spirit of Sidney say, over some who were born in the last Victorian years, Agnosco discipulos scholae meae.