After speaking of the influence of newspapers, and of the circumstances under which Editors are obliged to give the facts of the day or week (he is writing to a newspaper), Dr. Arnold proceeds:—
"Assuredly he who does honestly want to gain knowledge will not go to a newspaper to look for it.
"No, Sir, real knowledge, like everything else of the highest value, is not to "be obtained so easily. It must be worked fob, studied fob, thought FOR, and more than all, it must be played for. And that is education which lays the foundation of such habits, and gives them, so far as a boy's early age will allow, their proper exercise. For doing this, the materials exist in the studies actually pursued in our commercial schools; but it cannot be done effectually, if a boy's education is to be cut short at fourteen. His schooling may be ended without mischief, if his parents are able to guide his education afterwards; and the way to gain this hereafter is to make the most of the schooling time of the rising generation,—that, finding how much may be done even in their case, within the limited time allowed for their education, they may be anxious to give their children greater advantages, that the fruit may be proportionably greater.
"It may be that this is impracticable; to which I have only to say, that I will not believe it to be so till I am actually unable to hope otherwise."
On the Position of the Commercial Schoolmaster.
"The masters of our English or commercial schools labour under this double disadvantage—that not only their moral but their intellectual fitness must be taken upon trust. I do not mean that this is at all their fault; still less do I say that they are not fit actually for the discharge of their important duties: but still it is a disadvantage to them that their fitness can only be known after trial; they have no evidence of it to offer beforehand. They feel this inconvenience themselves, and their pupils feel it also—opportunities for making known their proficiency are wanting alike to both. It has long been the reproach of our law that it has no secondary punishments; it is no less true that we have no regular system of secondary education. The Classical schools throughout the country have Universities to look to: distinction at school prepares the way for distinction at college, and distinction at college is again the road to distinction and emolument as a teacher; it is a passport with which a young man enters life with advantage, either as a tutor or as a schoolmaster. But anything like local Universities—any so much as local distinction or advancement in life held out to encourage exertion at a commercial school, it is as yet vain to look for. Thus the business of education is degraded; for a schoolmaster of a commercial school, having no means of acquiring a general celebrity, is rendered dependent on the inhabitants of his own immediate neighbourhood; if he offends them he is ruined. This greatly interferes with the maintenance of discipline: the boys are well aware of their parents' power, and complain to them against the exercise of their master's authority. Nor is it always that the parents them-selves can resist the temptation of showing their own importance, and giving the master to understand that he must be careful how he ventures to displease them."—Miscellaneous Works of Dr. Arnold, p. 229.
