To all complaints of the classical curriculum there was one convincing answer: ...

To all complaints of the classical curriculum there was one convincing answer: there were hundreds of people who could teach it, there was hardly anyone who could teach anything else. 'If you want science,' Faraday told a Royal Commission, 'you must begin by creating science teachers.' In the eye of the law the public schools were nine in number, but in effect, in the sense of regularly preparing boys for the University, the list was continually enlarging.

By 1860 they were not dominant, but they were ascendant in the Universities, and, as they grew, the private tutor fell away, leaving his ample rectory as a burden to his impoverished successor; the career and type of the public-school boy became standardized, and the preparatory schools rose in corresponding importance.

The outlook of the newer schools was to some degree modernized by the demands of Woolwich and the Civil Service Commissioners for science and modern languages; but the Renaissance tradition was not seriously impaired, and when Lord Clarendon summed up all the charges against the public schools in a question to the Headmaster of Eton, 'We find modern languages, geography, chronology, history and everything else which a well-educated Englishman ought to know, given up in order that the whole time should be devoted to the classics, and at the same time we are told that the boys go up to Oxford not only not proficient, but in a lamentable deficiency in respect to the classics', the Headmaster could only answer, 'I am sorry for it' But public opinion did not want knowledge.