According to the first, education is useful in proportion as it tends, by repressing the activities and atrophying the faculties of the scholars, to keep the "lower orders" in their places, and in so doing to provide the "upper classes" with a sufficiency of labourers and servants.

According to the second, it is useful in proportion as it is able to prepare the scholars for their various callings in after life.[24] According to the third, in proportion as it enables the scholars to pass with credit certain "leaving" and other examinations of a formal type.
I will now assume that the end of education is to produce, or at any rate contribute to the production of, good men and women; and that the education given in elementary schools is useful in exact proportion as it serves this end.

I am not using the word "good" in its Sunday School sense.

Nor does the word suggest to my mind that blend of stupidity, patience, and submissiveness which sometimes passes for "goodness" when the "upper classes" are taking thought for the welfare of the "lower orders." The good man, as I understand the phrase, is a good son, a good brother, a good husband, a good father, a good citizen, a good townsman, a good workman, a good servant, a good master.

In fine, he is a good specimen of his kind, well grown and well developed, efficient on all the planes of his being,--physical, mental, moral, spiritual.