28 THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM

subjects the continuity is entirely broken owing to boys
either finding themselves trying to assimilate instruction
in a particular stage before they are ready for that stage
or else finding themselves compelled through missing
their form promotion to recapitulate the programme of
a subject which they may know perfectly. There is no
subject that this pernicious system hits more hardly than
that of modern languages.
The first cause of failure consequently is in the system
of form promotion, and the second cause lies in the fact
that rarely have form masters anything like a sound
education in this subject ; at any rate, the degrees of attainment
 vary considerably. The ideal is that no master
should teach more than two subjects at most, and it is
unreasonable to expect that all form masters should
possess facility in two modern languages or even in one.
At any rate they cannot be obtained. The result is
that a boy finds himself, for instance, in a form taken
by a master who speaks French fluently, and employs
what is known as the direct method, that is to say, that
the whole of the instruction is given in the language
studied. It takes the boy about a term to get the hang,
50 to speak, of this, to him, novel method, and he then gets
promoted to a form whose master is an eminent classical
or history scholar, and who cannot converse fluently, or
perhaps cannot converse at all, in the particular foreign
language. He is then set to learning page after page
of irregular verbs, his development along linguistic lines
is arrested, and by the time he reaches another form
master, whose subject is that particular language, he has
forgotten all he learnt, and has to start all over again.
Can we wonder at the small percentage of boys leaving
 a public school who can converse in a foreign language
 when we examine the system of education? And
yet under a suitable organization all boys should be able
to converse freely in at least one foreign language before