Book Description:
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: Huxley claim as large a part in the history of education as the great teachers or founders of schools and colleges. Probably the nearest approach which the State has made to originality in the sphere of education is to be found in the activities of the various Royal Commissions. Not even the most pronounced individualist would deny the capacity of the State to choose a number of the most thoughtful men in the country, to induce them for a limited time to devote their concentrated attention to a particular topic, and to give them facilities for collecting all available evidence and for coming into contact with all opinions worth having. It is probable too that these bodies of enquirers reached conclusions in their corporate capacity which no single member would have attained for himself. But it must be remembered that such conclusions only crystallised the thought of half a century on the problems concerned; and that their effect was produced quite as much by their influence on public opinion and through the subsequent action of individuals as through the legislative and administrative changes to which they gave rise. A comprehensive glance at the state of British universities and secondary schools between 1789 and 1815 reveals one outstanding feature. They do not reflect any ideals of their own age. No new driving power had come to them for a century and a half. To understand them we have to go back to the Renaissance. As early as the first half of the seventeenth century there had come a loss of faith in the educational ideals of classical humanism; by the second half of that century intellectual and moral enthusiasm was exhausted; and low water mark was reached in the middle of the eighteenth century. After that point moral energy was gathering power, but it was still unab...
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