The New Teaching of History by H.G. Wells

The feud which finds expression in Mr. A. W. Gomme's pamphlet is one of much older origin than the publication of _The Outline of History_. Mr. Gomme is a teacher of the Greek language, and it is thirty years and more since I first attacked the imposture of the Greek teaching in our public schools. Long before I sank below the possibility of serious consideration by my fellow-countrymen by becoming a novelist, I was a writer upon education; and many of the novels I have written, since, like most novels from the Book of Tobit onward, they tell the story of youth going out into the world, have reflected strongly on education. The "classical" master, who uses up the time of our boys in his devious and wonderful exercises, is generally a very poor Grecian himself, and he rarely produces a working knowledge of Greek in his victims. He uses up time, space and endowment in his futilities, and so he stands in the way of a proper development of lower form work leading up to the Modern Side.

The classical interests are still very strong in the Universities, they are a bar to the proper education of the British Civil Service and so a world-wide nuisance, and as a patriot, a parent and a schoolmaster I have raged against them. It was almost more than I could have hoped for, in that long-standing quarrel, that Mr. Gomme should have done up his extraordinary ideas and limitations into the neat packet of this pamphlet and so placed himself, a sample of the scholastic classic, in my hands.