A GENTLEMAN is different from a boor. Education in the ordinary sense could be said to be what makes a gentleman out of a boor. The word itself comes from the Latin ex and ducere (to draw from, or out), and the more modern of educational theories today have insisted on this aspect of education. Classical notions of education are diametrically opposed to such modern ones, which thus believe in drawing out what is already present in the child, rather than in putting book-learning into him by hard lessons to learn involving the tears and drudgery of classrooms. This change in perspective was ushered into existence by a bold man called Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is sometimes referred to in encyclopaedias of education as the Father of Modern Educational Theory. In spite of such recognition given to him, with his picture appearing on the frontispiece of Monroe’s Encyclopaedia of Education, Rousseau’s theories are still a closed book to many moderns. His Emile might be the Bible of educationists, but it contains too many enigmas which have puzzled and continue to puzzle even such intelligent modern minds as H.G. Wells, who calls Rousseau a hypochondriac who believed in shedding his sentimental tears into the Lac Leman of Geneva. Rousseau remains an enigma to modern educational authorities today, and his name hardly figures in the training courses of teachers at all. The modern teacher knows Montessori, Froebel and Pestalozzi. He understands the project-method of John Dewey, and how the school and society have to be related organically according to the standards of what is called the project-active school based on a pragmatic socialized outlook. The study of nature is also understood by him to be important – not in itself, but because of its benefits to society. The Herbartian educational theory favouring of post-Kantian speculation is too theoretical and bookish to appeal to the minds of modern experimental educators. Even Herbert Spencer as a naturalistic educator and the ideas of John Locke are considered as being outside the scope of education as understood in a pragmatic setting. One learns by doing, and play and work in the modern school room have to go hand in hand, instead of being divorced from each other. It is here that Montessori, Pestalozzi and Froebel are still respected in the modern educational world. Otherwise, the humanities are seen to recede into the background in any syllabus of modern schools generally.