Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 1900; the vast majority of these were educated in the classical gymnasium with its compulsory Latin and Greek. (2) Even in 1911, of over 400,000 boys receiving secondary education in Germany, 240,000 were at schools in which Latin is compulsory, and 170,000 of these at schools where Greek is compulsory also. (3) In the remaining, purely ' modern,' Real- schulen, so far from physical science occupying the chief place in the curriculum, only two hours out of twenty-five per week are allotted to it in the lowest forms and six out of thirty-one in the highest. The moral of these facts is that the highest scientific eminence can be attained by a nation in whose secondary education physical science is subordinate. They prove with absolute con- clusiveness that a classical education is not in itself the obstacle which prevents our becoming a ' scientific' nation. It is surely not too much to ask that our critics of the classics should attend to these figures, especially if they criticise in the name of science. In their own subjects they would consider it a duty to collect and weigh all the available facts before thev arrive at a con chapter{Section 4elusion. They are not exempted from doing so, when they come to talk about education ; but if anyone reads the Report of the Conference at Burlington House, he will find no trace that these elementary and accessible facts had ever been considered by the speakers who attacked the classics. Yet they are very instructive. They do not prove that all boys should learn Latin and Greek, or that modern schools are unnecessary, or that physical science can be ignored, or that everything is for the best as it is ; but they do prove that a nation can be ' scientific,' though compulsory classics are the staple of its secondary education, and... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.