As to the New Testament, its language is not addressed to children,
its sentiments are often so obviously impracticable that it defeats the
end of education, and its precepts and counsels are so emphatically
based on a disputable reward in heaven that their ethic savours of a
risky commercial speculation. We must abandon "Bible lessons," and teach
children to be human.
But for the work of education to end when the child leaves the school is
one of the crudities of our elementary civilisation. The human material
is just becoming fit for the efforts of the educator when the child
leaves school, yet from that moment we leave it to the casual and
largely pernicious influences of its environment. Some day, perhaps, our
education department will be more seriously concerned about the youth
and the adult than about impressing a few facts of history and geography
on the memory of the child: even if it did no more than organise and
direct the innumerable foundations and voluntary organisations which
actually exist, and bring them into living and practical contact with
our splendid museums and libraries and art-collections, a vast amount
could be done in the education of the adult.
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