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This book is based on an experience of nearly twenty years of school and college training, ten years of school-teaching, thirty-six years of college lecturing, and three years of retirement, to think it over. The opinion that I have reached is that education, in the narrow sense of school and college attendance, is taking too heavy a toll of the years of life and that the curriculum should be shortened. But, in the wider sense, what I want to advocate is not to make education shorter, but to make it much longer—indeed to make it last as long as life itself.

What I find wrong is the stark division now existing between the years of formal education and entry into the work of life. Education has become to a great extent a mere acquirement of a legal qualification to enter a closed profession, in place of being a process undertaken for its own sake. All that is best in education can only be acquired by spontaneous interest; thus gained it lasts and goes on. Education merely imposed as a compulsory prerequisite to something else finishes and withers when its task is done. Real education should mean a wonderful beginning, a marvellous initiation, a thorough "smattering," and life will carry it on.

A part of the present difficulty is that our school and college curriculum in its one thousand years of development from the church schools of the Middle Ages has taken on a mass of subject matter beyond the range of any one mind. We have not yet learned to condense to useful essentials the things beyond study in detail. The best part of any subject is the general view, the thorough smattering just mentioned, that carries to the individual the results for which others have given the work of their lives. The outline of the world's history can occupy half an hour, or half a session, or half a century.

We have further encumbered the curriculum with the attempt to teach things that cannot be imparted by classroom work—too practical for anything but actual practice, or too vague and general for anything but general reflection.

Nor is it only the subject matter of the curriculum that needs reduction. A saving of time perhaps equally important can be effected by altering the form and method of its progress. To a very great extent all our school children and students in America and in England move along in a system of one-year promotions, all advancing together—or staying back to join the next consignment.

Thus, by the time the student has reached middle high school on his way to college, he has already joined a sort of "convoy" that moves slowly down the widening stream of education, always at the pace of the slowest. It sweeps along majestically, working puzzles, muttering declensions, answering quizzes and translating "parlez-vous."

Any ordinary bright boy could strike out from the convoy, like a sloop from a fleet, like a fast motor boat from among freighters, and distance it by two years. By the time the heavy convoy reached its goal, he would have been there already for years, married, with one and a half children, an established position, whiskers, debts, life. He would watch the convoy discharging its spectacled neophytes, thirty years old, timid in the daylight, shuddering at life, having lived for thirty years on other people's money. That's a little exaggerated, but it's good enough.

The practical person asks how we are supposed to bring about this vastly altered program. To abolish overnight our whole system of examinations, promotions and graded classes moving all together would leave our education a hopeless mess. And to this the only answer is that there is nothing that we can do about it, nothing particular and all of a minute.

It is our current fault always to think in terms of deliberate regulation and ordinance. We seek to accomplish friendship with a league, Mother's Day with a statute, welcome with a by-law and sobriety with a code. Without the spirit, all falls in a littered heap. If education is to change, there must first come the consciousness of the need of change.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Professor Emeritus McGill

University, B.A. (Toronto), Ph.D.

(Chicago), Litt.D. (Brown,

Dartmouth and Toronto),

LL.D. (Queen's and McGill),

D.C.L. (Bishop's).

McGill University

October 1, 1939