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 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 AND OTHER 
 
 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES
 
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 THE 
 
 MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 AND OTHER 
 
 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES 
 
 BY 
 
 NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 
 
 PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AND EDUCATION 
 IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
 
 1905 
 
 All rightt reserved
 
 COPYBIGHT, 1898, 
 
 By THE HACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped March, 1898. Reprinted October, 
 1898; April, 1900 ; March, 1901: April, August, 1903; April, 
 1904; August, 1905. 
 
 Norixjooo $8S 
 
 J. S. Cushing & Co. Berwick & Smith 
 
 Norwood Mau. U.S.A.
 
 Education 
 Library 
 
 LB 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAOX 
 
 The Meaning of Education .... 3 
 
 What Knowledge is of Most Worth? . . 37 
 
 Is there a New Education? .... 69 
 
 Democracy and Education .... 99 
 
 The American College and the American 
 
 University 125 
 
 The Function of the Secondary School . 151 
 
 The Reform of Secondary Education in the 
 
 United States 187
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The essays and addresses brought together 
 in this volume give expression to convictions 
 and opinions on the subject of education that 
 have been presented during the past fifteen 
 years, in one form or another, to hundreds of 
 audiences, mainly of teachers, in almost every 
 state of the Union. The belief that controls 
 them all is threefold : first, that education, 
 in the broad sense in which I use the term, is 
 the most important of human interests, since 
 it deals with the preservation of the culture 
 and efficiency that we have inherited and with 
 their extension and development ; second, that 
 this human interest can and should be studied 
 in a scientific spirit and by a scientific method ; 
 and, third, that in a democracy at least an edu- 
 cation is a failure that does not relate itself 
 to the duties and opportunities of citizenship.
 
 Viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 Education is sharply distinguished, there- 
 fore, from the far narrower field of instruc- 
 tion, as that in turn is broader than the field 
 of school-life. To give to education its right- 
 ful place in our thinking involves relating it 
 to the laws of life in general, and especially 
 to those laws as viewed from the standpoint 
 of the doctrine of evolution. This I have 
 aimed to do by proposing an extension of the 
 commonly received doctrine of infancy, which 
 though as old as early Greek philosophy, 1 owes 
 its definite statement and exemplification to 
 Mr. John Fiske. In this way the theory of 
 education is given what it has hitherto lacked, 
 a distinct relationship to the facts of organic 
 and social evolution. 
 
 A standard must next be sought by which 
 the value of educational processes and influ- 
 ences may be judged. I find this standard in 
 the conclusion, common, I am confident, to the 
 best philosophy and to the soundest science 
 
 1 Butler, "Anaximander on the prolongation of infancy 
 in man," in Classical Studies in Honor of Henry Drisler 
 (New York: The Macmillan Co. for the Columbia Uni- 
 versity Press, 1894).
 
 INTRODUCTION i X 
 
 alike, that the facts of nature must be ex- 
 plained, in the last resort, in terms of energy, 
 and that energy in turn can be conceived only 
 in terms of will, which is the fundamental 
 form of the life of mind or spirit. 
 
 I offer these two conclusions as the basis 
 for an educational philosophy. With them in 
 mind I have discussed a number of concrete 
 problems that are of present importance not 
 to teachers alone, but to thoughtful parents 
 and to conscientious citizens. 
 
 It is sometimes hastily objected that the 
 attempt to formulate a scientific study of ed- 
 ucation is impossible. This objection rests 
 upon a misunderstanding as to what a science 
 is. Science is wholly a matter of method ; 
 it is knowledge classified, and nothing more. 
 The knowledge so classified may be know- 
 ledge of plants, or of heavenly bodies, or of 
 the human body, or of forms of government, 
 or of education. Only the sciences based upon 
 mathematics are exact or lay claim to exact- 
 ness ; all others are descriptive only, and wider 
 experience or further observation may modify 
 their conclusions at any time. A science of
 
 X INTRODUCTION 
 
 education is analogous to a science of medicine. 
 Both are built upon a group of ancillary sci- 
 ences, and both arrive at conclusions that are 
 only working hypotheses. "With normal chil- 
 dren, as with normal patients, these hypotheses, 
 based as they are upon wide experience, require 
 little or no modification ; in abnormal cases, 
 however, they must be modified or sometimes 
 even abandoned. Neither medicine nor edu- 
 cation makes any pretense to exactness. 
 
 It is highly important for the study of 
 education that a consistent nomenclature be 
 adopted and used, though for a variety of rea- 
 sons this is a difficult task to accomplish. 
 Bearing in mind this need, I have endeavored 
 to mark off the several types or grades of 
 educational institutions from each other, and 
 to give to each its appropriate name. Many 
 American educational problems that appear 
 very complex, would become much simpler if 
 the various institutions giving systematic in- 
 struction were always called each by its right 
 name. 
 
 To the teachers of the United States, espe- 
 cially to those who are members of the Na-
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 tional Educational Association, I am under 
 the deepest obligations for the encouragement 
 and sympathy that have led to the publica- 
 tion of these essays and addresses. To the 
 patient criticism and the kindly suggestion of 
 my friends and colleagues, Brander Matthews 
 and George Rice Carpenter, I owe many im- 
 provements in the form in which the papers 
 
 now appear. 
 
 NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 
 
 Columbia University, New York 
 March, 1898.
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION
 
 An Address 
 
 delivered before the Liberal Club of Buffalo, New York 
 
 November 19, 1896
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 Those who have an acquaintance, however 
 cursory, with the history of human thought 
 well remember how bitter and how persistent 
 have been the controversies of philosophers and 
 metaphysicians in respect to terms of everyday 
 use. Discussions on such familiar words as 
 "substance," "cause," "idea," and "matter" 
 have shaken the schools for ages. It seems 
 to be a fact that when a term is somewhat 
 unusual and remote from our experience and 
 our interest, we are apt readily to be able to 
 assign to it a definite significance and a con- 
 crete meaning ; but when it is a term with 
 which we are familiar in our everyday experi- 
 ence and conversation, we often feel its sig- 
 nificance and its import, and yet find great 
 difficulty in defining it accurately in logical 
 or in scientific terms. 
 
 3
 
 4 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 I shall discuss the meaning of Infancy and 
 Education just because the terms are familiar, 
 because the ideas are commonplace, and be- 
 cause, as it seems to me, we so often fail to 
 grasp their profound and far-reaching signifi- 
 cance. The point of view from which I shall 
 speak of them is the one given us by that 
 remarkable generalization which has come to 
 be known as the doctrine of evolution, a the- 
 ory which we all associate with the nineteenth 
 century, but which, nevertheless, was seen by 
 the thinkers of the ancient world, by the light- 
 ning flashes of their genius, in what is after all 
 very much the form in which the clear sun- 
 light of modern scientific demonstration pre- 
 sents it to us. The doctrine of evolution has 
 illuminated every problem of human thought 
 and human action. It is a mere truism to 
 say that it has revolutionized our thinking ; 
 but it is equally true that we have in very 
 many cases failed to accept the consequences 
 of the revolution and to understand them in 
 all their important applications. It seems to 
 me that in no department of our interest and 
 activity is this failure more complete, speak-
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 5 
 
 ing generally, than in that which relates to 
 the great human institution of education. 
 
 The two chief contributions that light up this 
 doctrine from the point of view that I wish to 
 occupy are those that were made by Mr. Al- 
 fred Russell Wallace and by Mr. John Fiske. 
 It was Mr. Wallace who pointed out, forty 
 odd years ago, that the theory of evolution as 
 applied to man could sustain itself only if it 
 were acknowledged and admitted that there 
 came a time in the history of animal types and 
 forms when natural selection seized upon psy- 
 chical or mental peculiarities and advantages 
 and perpetuated them rather than merely phys- 
 ical peculiarities and advantages. That is the 
 first, and in a sense, perhaps, the greater of 
 these contributions, for it has enabled us to un- 
 derstand the place of man in the order of the 
 cosmos. Then, in less than a generation, the re- 
 markable insight of Mr. John Fiske explained 
 for us on physiological and psychological 
 grounds the part played by the lengthening 
 period of infancy in the animal species. It is 
 from that doctrine of Mr. Fiske that I take my 
 point of departure in the present argument.
 
 6 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 We have come to understand that evolu- 
 tion regards us all as individual centres of 
 activity, influenced by our surroundings and 
 reacting upon them. We have come to un- 
 derstand that our physical, our mental, and 
 our moral life is the gradual growth or de- 
 velopment of what may be conceived of as a 
 point travelling through an ever-widening 
 series of circles, until, in this ripe and culti- 
 vated age, the point has come to include 
 within the circumference that it traces, all 
 that we call the knowledge or acquirement 
 or culture of the educated man. 
 
 The doctrine of infancy, as it has been ex- 
 plained to us, relates itself directly to that 
 figure and to that method of explanation. If 
 we contrast or compare the lower orders of 
 animal life with the higher, and particularly 
 with the human species, we are at once struck 
 by the fact that in the lower orders of exist- 
 ence there is no such thing as infancy. We 
 observe that the young are brought into the 
 world able to take care of themselves, to 
 react upon their environment at the mere 
 contact of air or food, to breathe, to digest,
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 7 
 
 and to live an individual existence. We are 
 further struck by the fact, on examining the 
 structure of animals of that kind, that there 
 is no nervous system or organization present, 
 except such as is necessary to carry on what 
 are called reflex actions. There is no central 
 storage warehouse ; there is nothing corre- 
 sponding to the human brain ; and there is 
 no action possible for animals of that type 
 in which any considerable time can elapse 
 between the impulse which comes in from 
 the world without, and the responding or 
 reacting movement or action on the part of 
 the animal itself. Each of those animals 
 lives the life of its parents. Each of those 
 animals, young and old alike, performs cer- 
 tain reflex actions with accuracy, with sure- 
 ness, with despatch ; no one of those animals 
 progresses, and none develops or has a his- 
 tory. When we pass to animals of a higher 
 order, however, there comes a time when our 
 attention is attracted by those that act in an 
 entirely different way. Their actions are more 
 complex, more numerous, more subtile, more 
 sustained ; and on turning again to the or-
 
 8 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 ganism that accompanies this and makes it 
 possible, we see at once that there is an in- 
 creased complexity of structure which accom- 
 panies this increasing complexity of function. 
 We find, as we study more highly organized 
 types of animal existence, that, sooner or 
 later, there comes a time when the offspring 
 of a given animal comes into the world un- 
 able to perform many of the functions that 
 become possible for it later. It brings with 
 it a host of developed reflex actions, but it 
 also brings with it many undeveloped poten- 
 tialities. Its organization is not complete 
 at the moment of birth ; and a period of help- 
 lessness or infancy, longer or shorter, must 
 result. In passing from the highest of the 
 lower animals to man, we reach a most im- 
 portant stage in the development of infancy. 
 In man we find the increasing bulk, and more 
 than that, the increasing complexity, of the 
 brain and central nervous system which ac- 
 company the complex adjustments and actions 
 that make up life. But though the human 
 animal is born into the world complete as 
 to certain series of reflex actions, its lungs
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 9 
 
 able to breathe, its heart to beat, its blood 
 vessels to contract, its glands to secrete, an 
 immense series of adjustments remains to be 
 made. While those adjustments are being 
 made, there is a more or less prolonged period 
 of helplessness or infancy. 
 
 The meaning of that period of helplessness 
 or infancy lies, as I see it, at the bottom of 
 any scientific and philosophical understanding 
 of the part played by education in human 
 life. Infancy is a period of plasticity ; it is a 
 period of adjustment ; it is a period of fitting 
 the organism to its environment : first, physi- 
 cal adjustment, and then adjustment on a far 
 larger and broader scale. This fitting of the i 
 organism to its environment on the larger and 
 broader scale is the field of education. In 
 other words, nature and heredity have so or- 
 ganized one side of animal life that it is com- 
 plete at the time of birth. A large series of 
 adjustments to the world around us, the series 
 of adjustments that in the case of man make 
 up the life that is really worth living, consti- 
 tutes the life of the mind or spirit. At birth, 
 those adjustments are not yet made and they
 
 10 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 have to be slowly and carefully acquired. We 
 are even born into the world with our senses, 
 "the windows of the soul," locked, uncoordi- 
 nated, unadjusted, unable to perform what is 
 eventually to be their function. It is a famil- 
 iar fact that sight, hearing, and touch all have 
 to be developed and trained and coeducated, 
 taught to act together, before the infant can 
 appreciate and understand the world of three 
 dimensions in which adults live, and which they 
 have supposed to be the only world known to 
 the human consciousness. While that period 
 of plasticity or adjustment lasts, there is natu- 
 rally and necessarily a vast influence exerted, 
 not only on the child but by the child. 
 
 I think Mr. Fiske is undeniably correct in 
 saying that the prolonged period of infancy 
 which is necessary to bring about these ad- 
 justments, lies at the foundation of the human 
 family, and therefore at the foundation of 
 society and of institutional life. The factor 
 in history that has changed the human being 
 from a gregarious animal to a man living in 
 a monogamic family is, if anthropology and 
 psychology teach us anything, unquestionably
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 11 
 
 the child. During this long period of helpless- 
 ness and dependence, the parents of the child 
 are kept together by a common centre of inter- 
 est; and the bonds of affection and interdepend- 
 ence that are eventually to constitute the family 
 are then permanently and closely knit. That 
 period of mutual association and dependence of 
 the parents extends at first over only eight, 
 ten, or twelve years. If two, three, or four 
 children are born to the same parents, it may 
 extend over a period much longer ; it may last 
 during one-third or even one -half of the aver- 
 age life of man. Out of that centre of depend- 
 ence and helplessness, the family, as we know it, 
 has grown ; and it has been constituted, so far 
 as we can explain it at all, by the lengthening 
 period of infancy in the animal kingdom and 
 in the human race. I might cite fact after 
 fact in illustration of this, from the history of 
 science and from natural history, were it not 
 wholly unnecessary. It is one of the most 
 profound generalizations of our modern science; 
 and it has enabled us to see to the very bottom 
 of the meaning of education and to under- 
 stand the biological significance of one of the
 
 12 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 most striking and imposing of social phe- 
 nomena. 
 II This lengthening period of infancy is a 
 period of plasticity. No animal that has not 
 a period of infancy needs to be educated. 
 Every animal that has a period of infancy can 
 and must be educated. The longer the period 
 of infancy the more education is possible for 
 it ; and as our civilization has become more 
 complex, as its products have become more 
 numerous, richer, deeper, and more far-reach- 
 ing, the longer we have extended that period 
 of tutelage, until now, while the physiological 
 
 (period of adolescence is reached in perhaps four- 
 teen or fifteen years, the educational period of 
 dependence is almost twice as long. That is 
 to say, the length of time that it takes for the 
 human child in this generation so to adapt 
 himself to his surroundings as to be able to 
 succeed in them, to conquer them, and to make 
 them his own, is almost, if not quite thirty years. 
 The education in the kindergarten, the elemen- 
 tary school, the secondary school, the college, 
 the professional school, the period of appren- 
 ticeship in the profession before independent
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 13 
 
 practice can be entered upon, is in not a few 
 cases, now twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty- 
 eight, or even thirty years. 
 
 The rich suggestion that this doctrine of Mr. 
 Fiske and this conception of modern science 
 have for us, seems to me to be this: The 
 entire educati onal pe riod after the physical 
 adjustment has been made, after the child can 
 walk alone, can feed itself, can use its hands, 
 and has therefore acquired physical and bodily 
 independence, is aji a djustmen t to what may 
 be c alled our s piritua l environment . After 
 the physical adjustment is reasonably complete, 
 there remains yet to be accomplished the build- 
 ing of harmonious and reciprocal relations with 
 those great acquisitions of the race that con- 
 stitute civilization ; and therefore the lengthen- 
 ing period of infancy simply means that we are 
 spending nearly half of the life of each genera- 1 
 tion in order to develop in the young some con- 
 ception of the vast acquirements of the historic 
 past and some mastery of the conditions of the' 
 immediate present. 
 
 In other words, the doctrine of evolution 
 teaches us to look upon the world around us
 
 14 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 our art, our science, our literature, our insti- 
 tutions, and our religious life as an integral 
 part, indeed as the essential part, of our en- 
 vironment ; and it teaches us to look upon 
 education as the plastic period of adapting 
 and adjusting our self -active organism to this 
 vast series of hereditary acquisitions. So that 
 while the child's first right and first duty is 
 to adjust himself physiologically to his envi- 
 ronment, to iearn to walk, to use his hands 
 and to feed himself, to be physically inde- 
 pendent, there still remains the great outer 
 circle of education or culture, without contact 
 with which no human being is really either 
 man or woman. The child receives first, and 
 in a short series of years, his animal inheri- 
 tance ; it then remains for us in the period 
 of education to see to it that he comes into 
 his human inheritance. When we compare 
 the life of the lower animal, acting solely and 
 entirely by reflex action and instinct, with the 
 periods of infancy and of self-determined ac- 
 tivity of the human being, developing by 
 reflex action, instinct, and intelligence, we get 
 some conception of the vast difference there
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 15 
 
 is between what Descartes called the animal 
 mechanism and what we may truly look upon 
 as the activity of the human mind. 
 
 This period of adjustment constitutes, then, 
 the period of education ; and this period of 
 adjustment must, as it seems to me, give us 
 the basis for all educational theory and all', 
 educational practice. It must be the point 
 of departure in that theory and that practice, 
 and it must at the same time provide us with 
 our ideals. When we hear it sometimes said, 
 "All education must start from the child," 
 we must add, "Yes, and lead into human 
 civilization " ; and when we hear it said, on 
 the other hand, that all education must start 
 from the traditional past, we must add, " Yes, 
 and be adapted to the child." We shall then 
 understand how the great educational temple 
 of modern times into which every civilized 
 nation is pouring out its strength and its 
 treasure, rests upon the two corner-stones 
 of the physical and psychical nature of the 
 child and the traditional and hereditary civili- 
 zation of the race ; and how it is that the 
 problem of the family, of the school, and of
 
 16 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 the home, is to unite those two elements so 
 that each shall possess the other. We shall 
 then have a conception of education which 
 is in accord with the doctrine of evolution 
 and which is in accord with the teachings of 
 modern science and of modern philosophy. 
 
 After the child comes into the enjoyment 
 of his physical inheritance, he must be led by 
 the family, the school, and the state into his 
 intellectual or spiritual inheritance. The mo- 
 ment that fact is stated in those terms it 
 becomes absolutely impossible for us ever 
 again to identify education with mere instruc- 
 tion. It becomes absolutely impossible for us 
 any longer to identify education with mere 
 acquisition of learning ; and we begin to 
 look upon it as really the vestibule of the 
 highest and the richest type of living. It 
 was the great thought of Plato, that inspired 
 every word he ever wrote and that consti- 
 tutes an important portion of his legacy to 
 uture ages, that life and philosophy are 
 dentical; but he used the word philosophy 
 in a sense which was familiar to him and to 
 his time, and for which we might very well
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 17 
 
 substitute, under some of its phases at least, 
 the word education. Life and education are 
 identical, because the period to which we tra- 
 ditionally confine the latter term is merely the 
 period of more formal, definite, determinate 
 adjustment ; yet, just so long as life lasts and 
 our impressionability and plasticity remain, we 
 are always adapting ourselves to this environ- 
 ment, gaining power, like Antseus of old, each 
 time we touch the Mother Earth from which 
 civilization springs. 
 
 If education cannot be identified with mere 
 instruction, what is it ? What does the term 
 mean? I answer, it must mean a gradual 
 adjustment to the spiritual possessions of the 
 race. Those possessions may be variously 
 classified, but they certainly are at least five-i 
 fold. The child is entitled to his scientific ,<o 
 inheritance, to his literary inheritance, to nisi 
 aesthetic inheritance, to his institutional in- 
 heritance, and to his religious inheritance. ~ 
 Without them he cannot become a truly edu-, 
 cated or a cultivated man. 
 
 He is entitled to his scientific inheritance. 
 In other words, he is entitled to go out into
 
 18 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 nature, to love it, to come to know it, to under- 
 stand it ; and he is entitled to go out into it, 
 not only as the early Greek and Oriental 
 thinkers went, with fear and trembling and 
 worship, but he is entitled to go out into it 
 armed with all the resources of modern scien- 
 tific method and all the facts acquired by 
 modern research. He is entitled to know how 
 it was that we have passed from the world 
 known to the heroes of the Iliad to the world 
 as we know it to-day. He is entitled to know 
 how the heavens have declared their glory to 
 man, and how the worlds of plant and animal 
 and rock have all come to unfold the story of 
 the past and to enrich us with the thought and 
 the suggestion of the intelligence, the design, 
 the order that they manifest. There can be no 
 sound and liberal education that is not based in 
 part upon the scientific inheritance of the race. 
 The learning of the multiplication table, the 
 learning of the necessary preliminary defini- 
 tions, the learning of the necessary methods of 
 research and practice all these are the lower 
 steps of the ladder, the needful steps by 
 which we must mount ; and yet they are the
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 19 
 
 steps from which how often we fall back with- 
 out having gained any vision whatever of the 
 land to which they are supposed to lead ! The 
 scientific inheritance is one of the very first 
 elements of a modern liberal education, because 
 it is that element which presents itself earliest 
 to the senses of the child. It is the element 
 with which he comes in immediate sense-con- 
 tact ; to which he can be first led ; from which 
 he may be made to understand and draw 
 lessons of the deepest significance for his life 
 and for that adaptation which is his edu- 
 cation. 
 
 Next there is the vast literary inheritance, 
 the phase of the past that mankind has during 
 twenty-fire hundred years most loved to dwell 
 upon. It is the side that has captivated the 
 imagination, enshrined itself in language, and 
 brought itself closest to the heart of cultivated 
 man, going back to the earliest attempts at 
 mythology and coming down to the great 
 poetry and the great prose of the eighteenth 
 and nineteenth centuries in modern tongues. 
 We have gone so far as to call this aspect of 
 civilization the "humanities," because most of
 
 20 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 all it seems to bear upon its surface the sig- 
 nificance of that fine old word humanitas which 
 was once the ideal of liberal education. " Hu- 
 manities" these studies undoubtedly are, but 
 humanitas is a broader term still, and in its 
 full significance must be made to include all 
 our inheritance, scientific, aesthetic, institu- 
 tional, and religious, as well as literary. Just 
 as scientific method is the gate to the scientific 
 inheritance and therefore must in essence at 
 least be mastered, so language is the gate to 
 the literary inheritance and must be mastered 
 at the earliest opportunity. We are accus- 
 tomed, as a rule, to estimate and weigh power 
 and culture in terms of language. The mas- 
 tery of various languages, the mastery even 
 of the mother tongue, is often taken as the 
 sole test of culture. That is our tribute to 
 its great importance. We see how easily the 
 mastery of a language, or of more than one, 
 lends itself to this conception of education 
 as an adaptation, as an adjustment, to the 
 spiritual environment of the race. 
 
 Language is the crystallized thought of the 
 past. It contains in itself, in its products and
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 21 
 
 its forms, in its delicate discriminations, its 
 powers of comparison and abstraction, a record 
 of the progress of the thought of the race. 
 When we are plodding through dreary de- 
 tails of grammar and of rhetoric we are again 
 on the lower rungs of the ladder, the multi- 
 plication table of the literary inheritance, 
 the steps that must be taken if we are to 
 come to understand what the great world- 
 poets and seers have revealed to us. There- 
 fore it is that we are to-day putting the 
 literary inheritance side by side with the sci- 
 entific in the very earliest years of the educa- 
 tion of the child. In the education that is 
 sometimes called " new," it will be found 
 that the early linguistic exercises are almost 
 always based upon something that is really 
 worth knowing for its own sake. Our litera- 
 tures the world over, ancient and modern, are 
 so rich, so full of thought and feeling and 
 action, that there is no time to waste in the 
 merely formal exercises of grammatical drill 
 upon lifeless material, when we may be occupy- 
 ing ourselves, in those same exercises and for 
 the same purpose of discipline, with material
 
 22 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 (that enriches the human mind and touches and 
 refines the human heart. Modern education in 
 its adjustments is bringing the child into his 
 literary inheritance in a new spirit. That 
 inheritance has always been before mankind. 
 In the Middle Ages, in early modern educa- 
 tion, in European education to-day, the study 
 of language and literature is and has been the 
 main element in instruction. It must always 
 hold a prominent place in education, for it ad- 
 mits of no substitute. Yet it is mere narrow- 
 ness to say that this study alone is sufficient, 
 and that it excludes everything else. It should 
 come side by side with the scientific inheritance 
 in the early life of the child, during the period 
 of plasticity or education. 
 
 The third element in education is the aes- 
 thetic inheritance, that feeling for the beautiful, 
 the picturesque, and the sublime that has al- 
 ways been so great a part of human life, 
 that contributes so much to human pleasure 
 I and accentuates so much of human pain and 
 suffering. The ancient Greeks understood and 
 used it, but a false and narrowing philosophy 
 thrust it out of life and education for cen- 
 
 /
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 23 
 
 turies because it was supposed to antagonize 
 the spiritual or religious life. It was believed 
 that the spirit could be chastened only by- 
 privation and by pain, by tearing it away from 
 one whole side of human civilization, and by 
 insisting that the human heart should suppress 
 its feeling, its longing for the ideal in the realm 
 of feeling and of beauty. The closet philoso- 
 phers could accomplish their end in education 
 for a time, but they were utterly unable to sup- 
 press the builders of the Gothic cathedrals 
 or the Italian painters of the Renaissance, and 
 they have been unable to suppress the artistic 
 element in human life. To-day we find it 
 coming back to occupy its appropriate place. 
 We should no longer think of applying the 
 word cultivated to a man or woman who 
 had no aesthetic sense, no feeling for the beauti- 
 ful, no appreciation of the sublime, because we 
 should be justified in saying, on all psychologi- 
 cal grounds, that that nature was deficient and 
 defective. This great aspect of civilization, 
 this great tide of feeling that ebbs and flows 
 in every human breast, which makes even the 
 dull and inappreciative peasant uncover his
 
 24 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 head as he passes through the wonderful gal- 
 leries of the Vatican or the Louvre this, 
 too, is a necessary factor in adjusting our- 
 selves to the full richness of human conquest 
 and human acquisition. Unless we are to be 
 mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, 
 we should see to it that the aesthetic inheri- 
 tance is placed side by side with the scientific 
 and the literary in the education of the human 
 child. To-day we find art creeping into the 
 schoolroom; instruction in color, in form, in 
 expression is being given. The growing child 
 is surrounded with representations of the 
 classic in art, and so, unconsciously and by 
 imitation, he is being taught to adapt and 
 adjust himself to this once forgotten and now 
 recovered element in human civilization; an 
 element that certainly is, like the scientific and 
 literary elements, an integral part of the child's 
 inheritance. 
 
 Then there is also the wonderful institu- 
 tional inheritance, most wonderful of all, be- 
 cause it brings us into immediate contact with 
 the human race itself. This is the element of 
 civilization before which we must, for the mo-
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 25 
 
 ment, sink differences of scientific opinion, 
 differences of literary appreciation, differences 
 of aesthetic judgment, and in which we look 
 upon individual man as but a member of a 
 larger whole, in order to understand what 
 human civilization really means. We have 
 always had before us, in the history of civiliza- 
 tion, two extreme types of thought and opinion 
 as to human institutions. We have had the 
 view typified in modern philosophy by Rous- 
 seau, and wrought out in the streets of Paris 
 from 1789 to 1794. This is, substantially, the 
 view that every individual is sufficient unto 
 himself. It is the view of the ancient Sophists, 
 once combated by Socrates in the streets of 
 Athens, that there are as many truths as there 
 are men to perceive truth, and that each indi- 
 vidual is the sole arbiter of his own fortunes. 
 This is what I may call the atomic view 
 of human society, which would blow all of our 
 institutional life into millions of atoms and 
 deify each. That view has failed to work 
 itself out successfully in history ; when it has 
 had a momentary victory it has simply been 
 because it came as a reaction against the
 
 26 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 tyranny of the opposite extreme. We have 
 had the other extreme also. We have had the 
 view which insists that no individual is of any 
 consequence or importance in the presence of 
 the mass ; the view that all individual peculi- 
 arity, all individual power or acquisition, must 
 be pressed down and trampled under foot for 
 the advantage of the whole. We have seen it 
 in the civilization of China in the interest of 
 ancestor worship ; we have seen it in the civili- 
 zation of India in the interest of the caste sys- 
 tem ; we have seen it in the civilization of 
 Egypt in the interest of the priestly class ; and 
 we have seen those three civilizations wither 
 and die. 
 
 We have come to understand, again follow- 
 ing the seed-thought of the Greeks, that the 
 true line of institutional progress lies between 
 the two extremes ; that that conception of our 
 institutional life is the true one which regards 
 each of us as a unit but still as a part of a 
 larger unit, which regards each of us as en- 
 titled to liberty but in subordination to law. 
 We have come to regard this as the last les- 
 son of a political philosophy that is based
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 27 
 
 upon a study of human history and of human 
 nature. The conception of liberty under the 
 law, allowing a field for every human activity 
 to develop and enrich itself without pulling 
 down its fellow, all cooperating toward a com- 
 mon end, typifies and explains, better than any 
 extreme theory of philosopher or sciolist, the 
 institutional life of the race. We look back 
 and see how that institutional life has been 
 developed. We see the right of private prop- 
 erty, the common law, the state, the church, 
 the freedom of the press, education, one great 
 institution after another emerging from the 
 mist of indefiniteness and taking its part in 
 the structure of our modern life; and we say 
 at once that no liberal education can be com- 
 plete that does not include some comprehension 
 of all that. Unless the child understands that 
 though he is an individual he is also a member 
 of the body politic, of an institutional life in 
 which he must give and take, defer and obey, 
 adjust and correlate, and that without all this 
 there can be no civilization and no progress, 
 we are thrown back into the condition either 
 of anarchy the anarchy of Rousseau or the
 
 28 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 collectivism and stagnation of China, India, and 
 Egypt. We have wrested that institutional life 
 from history and it is going to-day into the 
 education of children all over the civilized 
 world. In this way they are being given their 
 institutional inheritance ; they are being given 
 some insight not alone into their rights, which 
 are so easy to teach, but into their duties, which 
 are so easy to forget ; and the institutional life 
 that carries with it lessons of duty, responsi- 
 bility, and the necessity for cooperation in the 
 working out of high ideals, is being put before 
 children wherever sound education is given to- 
 day, from the kindergarten to the university. 
 
 Finally, there is the religious inheritance of 
 the child. No student of history can doubt 
 its existence and no observer of human nat- 
 ure will undervalue its significance. We are 
 still far from comprehending fully the pre- 
 ponderant influence of religion in shaping our 
 contemporary civilization ; an influence that is 
 due in part to the universality of religion 
 itself, and in part to the fact that it was, 
 beyond dispute, the chief human interest at 
 the time when the foundations of our present
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 29 
 
 superstructure were being laid. It has played 
 a controlling part in education till very re- 
 cently, although it has too often played that 
 part in a narrow, illiberal, and uninformed 
 spirit. The progress of events during the 
 nineteenth century, however, has resulted in 
 greatly altering the relation of the religious 
 influence in education, at first to education's 
 incalculable gain, and, more recently, to edu- 
 cation's distinct loss. The growing tendency 
 toward what is known as the separation of 
 church and state, but what is more accu- 
 rately described as the independence of man's 
 political and religious relationships, and, con- 
 currently, the development of a public educa- 
 tional conscience which has led the state to 
 take upon itself a large share of the responsi- 
 bility for education, have brought about the 
 practical exclusion of the religious element 
 from public education. This is notably true 
 in France and in the United States. In the 
 state school system of France, all trace of 
 religious instruction has been lacking since 
 1882; and it is hard to dignify with the names 
 influence or instruction the wretchedly formal
 
 30 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 religious exercises that are gone through with 
 in American public schools. 
 
 The result of this condition of affairs is 
 that religious teaching is rapidly passing out 
 of education entirely ; and the familiarity with 
 the English Bible as the greatest classic of 
 our tongue, that every cultivated man owes 
 it to himself to possess, is becoming a thing 
 of the past. Two solutions of the difficulty 
 are proposed. One is that the state shall 
 tolerate all existing forms of religious teach- 
 ing in its own schools, time being set apart 
 for the purpose. The other is that the state 
 shall aid, by money grants, schools maintained 
 by religious or other corporations. Neither 
 suggestion is likely to be received favorably 
 by the American people at present, because 
 of the bitterness of the war between the 
 denominational theologies. Yet the religious 
 element may not be permitted to pass wholly 
 out of education unless we are to cripple it 
 and render it hopelessly incomplete. It must 
 devolve upon the family and the church, then, 
 to give this instruction to the child and to 
 preserve the religious insight from loss. Both
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 31 
 
 family and church must become much more 
 efficient, educationally speaking, than they are 
 now, if they are to bear this burden success- 
 fully. This opens a series of questions that 
 may not be entered upon here. It is enough 
 to point out that the religious element of hu- 
 man culture is essential ; and that, by some 
 effective agency, it must be presented to 
 every child whose education aims at complete- 
 ness or proportion. 
 
 The period of infancy is to be used by civil- 
 ized men for adaptation along these five lines, 
 in order to introduce the child to his intellectual 
 and spiritual inheritance, just as the shorter 
 period of infancy in the lower animals is used 
 to develop, to adjust, and to co-ordinate those 
 physical actions which constitute the higher 
 instincts, and which require the larger, the more 
 deeply furrowed, and the more complex brain. 
 
 That, as it seems to me, is the lesson of biol- 
 ogy, of physiology, and of psychology, on the 
 basis of the theory of evolution, regarding the 
 meaning and the place of education in modern 
 life. It gives us a conception of education
 
 32 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 which must, I am quite sure, raise it above 
 the mechanical, the routine, the purely arti- 
 ficial. We see that this period of prepara- 
 tion is not a period of haphazard action, a 
 period of possible neglect, or a period when 
 time may be frittered away and lost, but 
 that every moment of adjustment is precious 
 and that every new adaptation and correlation 
 is an enrichment not only of the life of the in- 
 dividual but of the life of the race. For now 
 we all understand perfectly well that this 
 long period of infancy and adaptation, this 
 period of plasticity and education, is that which 
 makes progress possible. That is why it is 
 entirely correct to say that each generation 
 is the trustee of civilization. Each generation 
 owes it to itself and to its posterity to protect 
 its culture, to enrich it and to transmit it. 
 The institution that mankind has worked out 
 for that purpose is the institution known as 
 education. When a child has entered into this 
 inheritance, first physical, then scientific, liter- 
 ary, aesthetic, institutional, and religious, then 
 we use the word culture to signify the state 
 that has been attained.
 
 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 33 
 
 The word culture is very modern. It is 
 used in its present sense only during the latter 
 portion of the eighteenth century and during 
 our own. It owes its present significance 
 largely to Goethe and to Herder, the two 
 men who did most to make it familiar in its 
 modern sense. But while the word may be 
 new, the conception itself is old. It is the 
 7raiBe(a of the Greeks, the humanitas of the 
 Romans ; and after all it expresses pretty much 
 what the patrician Roman, dwelling in his 
 country house, had in mind when he sent his 
 boy, after giving him some instruction in agri- 
 culture, in law, and in military duty, to the 
 great city of Rome itself in order to obtain 
 urbanitas, city-ness. We have softened that 
 word down until it means merely polished man- 
 ner, but when the Romans first used it they 
 meant by it pretty much what we mean by 
 culture. The conception of culture is old, 
 therefore ; it has always been before the ideal- 
 ists of the human race from the earliest times. 
 We have given to this new word rich, full, 
 and diversified meaning, based, as I say, upon 
 the knowledge of the child and upon the
 
 34 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 
 
 knowledge of the historic past. When we 
 use it in that sense, we are using it, as we 
 may properly, to indicate the ideal of our 
 modern education.
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST 
 WORTH ?
 
 Presidential Address 
 
 delivered before the 
 
 National Educational Association 
 
 at Denver, Colorado, July 9, 1895
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST 
 WORTH? 
 
 The student of history is struck with the 
 complexity of modern thought. From the 
 dawn of philosophy to the great Revival of 
 Learning the lines of development are com- 
 paratively simple and direct. During that 
 period one may trace, step by step, the evolu- 
 tion of the main problems of thought and 
 action, and discover readily how the theories of 
 the seers stood the test of application by the 
 men of deeds. At Athens during the great 
 fifth century the inner life was the chief part 
 of life itself. In that age of the world life 
 was simple ; and often, because of its refine- 
 ment and independence, more reflective than 
 with us. Men's ideals were more sharply 
 defined and more easily realizable. They did 
 not doubt that the world existed for them and 
 37
 
 38 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 their enjoyment. Even that relatively advanced 
 stage of human culture of which Dante is the 
 immortal exponent, believed, as Mr. John Fiske 
 says, 1 that " this earth, the fair home of man, 
 was placed in the centre of a universe wherein 
 all things were ordained for his sole behoof: the 
 sun to give him light and warmth, the stars in 
 their courses to preside over his strangely 
 checkered destinies, the winds to blow, the 
 floods to rise, or the fiend of pestilence to stalk 
 abroad over the land all for the blessing, or 
 the warning, or the chiding, of the chief 
 among God's creatures, Man." With such a 
 conception as this, theory and practice could be 
 closely related. In the ancient world it was. 
 not unusual to find the thought of the disciple 
 guided implicitly by the maxim of the master. 
 TvwOi creavrov and Nil admirari were preached 
 by the early philosophers in the confident be- 
 lief that they could be practised by him who 
 would. 
 
 In these modern days all this is changed. 
 Man has come to doubt not only his supremacy 
 in the universe, but even his importance. He 
 1 The destiny of man (Boston, 1887), p. 12.
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 39 
 
 finds that, far from dwelling at the centre of 
 things, he is but "the denizen of an obscure 
 and tiny speck of cosmical matter quite invisi- 
 ble amid the innumerable throng of flaming 
 suns that make up our galaxy." A flood of 
 new knowledge has appealed to human sympa- 
 thy and interest, and has taxed them to the 
 utmost. Galileo with his telescope has re- 
 vealed to us the infinitely great ; and the com- 
 pound microscope of Jansen has created, as out 
 of nothing, the world of the infinitely small. 
 Within a generation or two biology has been 
 created ; and physics, chemistry, and geology 
 have been born again. The first wave of 
 astonishment and delight at these great revela- 
 tions has been succeeded by one of perplexity 
 and doubt in the presence of the wholly new 
 problems that they raise. The old self-assur- 
 ance is lost. Men first stumble, blinded by the 
 new and unaccustomed light, and then despair. 
 The age of the faith and assured conviction of 
 Aquinas was followed by the bold and cynical 
 scepticism of Montaigne ; and this in turn 
 for scepticism has never afforded a resting- 
 place for the human spirit for more than a
 
 40 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 moment has yielded to the philosophy of dis- 
 enchantment and despair of a Schopenhauer 
 and the morbidly acute and unsatisfying self- 
 analysis of an Amiel. Already it is proclaimed 
 by Nordau and his school that we are in an age 
 of decadence, and that many of our contempo- 
 rary interpreters of life and thought Wag- 
 ner, Tolstoi, Ibsen, Zola, the pre-Raphaelites 
 are fit subjects for an insane asylum. Man- 
 kind is divided into warring camps, and while 
 electricity and steam have bound the nations of 
 the earth together, questions of knowledge and 
 of belief have split up every nation into sects. 
 In all this tumult it is difficult to catch the 
 sound of the dominant note. Each suggested 
 interpretation seems to lead us further into the 
 tangled maze, where we cannot see the wood 
 for the trees. Standards of truth are more 
 definite than ever before ; but standards of 
 worth are strangely confused, and at times 
 even their existence is denied. 
 
 Amid all this confusion, however, a light has 
 been growing steadily brighter for those who 
 have eyes to see. In our own century two 
 great masters of thought have come forward,
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 41 
 
 offering, like Ariadne of old, to place in our 
 hands the guiding thread that shall lead us 
 through the labyrinth the German Hegel 
 and the Englishman Herbert Spencer. And 
 as the century closes, amid the din of other and 
 lesser voices, we seem to hear the deeper tones 
 of these two interpreters swelling forth as 
 representative of the best and most earnest 
 endeavors, from two totally different points of 
 view, of human seekers after light. Each has 
 taken the whole of knowledge for his province, 
 each has spread out before us a connected view 
 of man and his environment, and each would 
 
 "... assert Eternal Providence 
 And justify the ways of God to men." 
 
 These great teachers typify the catholicity and 
 the scientific method that are so characteristic 
 of the best expressions of our modern civiliza- 
 tion Whatever of insight we have gained 
 into history, into philosophy, into art, and into 
 nature, they have incorporated in their syste- 
 matic thinking and have endeavored to illumine 
 with the light of their controlling principles. 
 Hegel, schooled in the teachings of Kant and
 
 42 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 Fichte, and coming early to an appreciation of 
 the seed-thought of Plato and Aristotle, Bruno 
 and Spinoza, has taught us in unmistakable 
 language that independent, self -active being is 
 the father of all things. Spencer, feeling the 
 thrill of that unity which makes the cosmos 
 one, and receiving from Lamarck and von 
 Baer the hint that led him to see that the life 
 of the individual furnishes the clew to the 
 understanding of the life of the aggregate, 
 whether natural or social, has formulated into 
 a single and irrefutable law of progress the 
 terms of that development, or evolution, which 
 has been more or less dimly before the mind of 
 man since thought began. The German with 
 his principle of self -activity, and the English- 
 man with his law of evolution, offer us a foot- 
 hold for our knowledge and our faith, and 
 assure us that it will safely support them. 
 From the one we learn the eternal reasonable- 
 ness of all that is or can be, while the other 
 teaches us the character of the process by 
 which the visible universe, that every day pre- 
 sents new wonders to our gaze, has been 
 builded out of the primeval star-dust. At
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 43 
 
 their hands the two sublime and awe-inspiring 
 verities of Kant the starry heavens above 
 and the moral law within find their places in 
 the life of the spirit, and together testify to its 
 eternity and its beauty. 
 
 Despite the fact that our age is one of un- 
 exampled scientific and industrial progress, 
 yet nothing in all our modern scientific activ- 
 ity is more striking than the undisputed 
 primacy of thought thought not in antago- 
 nism to sense, but interpretative of the data 
 of sense. Idealism, shorn of its crudities 
 and its extravagances, and based on reason 
 rather than on Berkeley's analysis of sense- 
 perception, is conquering the world. What 
 Plato saw, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and 
 Hegel have demonstrated. The once-dreaded 
 materialism has lost all its terrors. Science 
 itself has analyzed matter into an aggregate 
 of dynamical systems, and speaks of energy 
 in terms of will. The seemingly inert stone 
 that we grasp in our hand is in reality an 
 aggregate of an infinite number of rapidly- 
 moving centres of energy. Our own will 
 is the only energy of whose direct action we
 
 44 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 are immediately conscious, and we use our 
 experience of it to explain other manifestations 
 of energy to ourselves. Modern mathemat- 
 ics, that most astounding of intellectual crea- 
 tions, has projected the mind's eye through 
 infinite time and the mind's hand into bound- 
 less space. The very instants of the begin- 
 nings of the sun's eclipses are predicted for 
 centuries and seons to come. Sirius, so dis- 
 tant that the light from its surface, travelling 
 at a rate of speed that vies with the light- 
 ning, requires more than eight and one-half 
 years to reach us, is weighed, and its constitu- 
 ents are counted almost as accurately as are 
 the bones of our bodies. Yet in 1842 Comte 
 declared that it was forever impossible to 
 hope to determine the chemical composition 
 or the mineralogical structure of the stars. 
 An unexpected aberration in the motions of 
 Uranus foretold an undiscovered planet at a 
 given spot in the sky, and the telescope of 
 Galle, turned to that precise point, revealed 
 to the astonished senses what was certain to 
 thought. But yesterday a discrepancy in the 
 weight of nitrogen extracted from the air we
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 45 
 
 breathe, led Lord Rayleigh, by an inexorable 
 logic, to the discovery of a new atmospheric 
 constituent, argon. The analytical geometry 
 of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and 
 Leibniz have expanded into the marvellous 
 mathematical method more daring in its 
 speculations than anything that the history 
 of philosophy records of Lobachevsky and 
 Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, 
 mathematics, the indispensable tool of the 
 sciences, defying the senses to follow its 
 splendid flights, is demonstrating to-day, as 
 it has never been demonstrated before, the 
 supremacy of the pure reason. The great 
 Cayley who has been given the proud title 
 of the Darwin of the English school of 
 mathematicians said a few years ago : 1 "I 
 would myself say that the purely imaginary 
 objects are the only realities, the 6W&)? oma, 
 in regard to which the corresponding physi- 
 cal objects are as the shadows in the cave ; 
 and it is only by means of them that we are 
 able to deny the existence of a correspond- 
 
 1 Presidential address, British Association for the Ad- 
 vanccment of Science, Southport, 1883.
 
 46 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 ing physical object; and if there is no con- 
 ception of straightness, then it is meaningless 
 to deny the conception of a perfectly straight 
 line." 
 
 The physicist, also, is coming to see that 
 his principle of the conservation of energy in 
 its various manifestations is a new and star- 
 tling proof of the fundamental philosophical 
 principle of self-activity. Energy manifests 
 itself as motion, heat, light, electricity, chemi- 
 cal action, sound. Each form of its mani- 
 festation is transmutable into others. The 
 self -active cycle is complete. 
 
 But it is not from the domain of natural 
 science alone that illustrations of the all- 
 conquering power of thought can be drawn. 
 The genius of Champollion has called to life 
 the thoughts and deeds of Amenotep and 
 Rameses ; and what appeared to sense as rude 
 decorative sketches on the walls of temple 
 and of tomb are seen by the understanding 
 to be the recorded history of a great civiliza- 
 tion in the valley of the Nile. The inscruta- 
 ble Sphinx, that watchdog of the Pyramids, 
 " unchangeable in the midst of change," which
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 47 
 
 sat facing the coming dawn for centuries 
 before the storied siege of Troy, now looks 
 down on modern men who write the very 
 words of its builders in the language of 
 Shakspere and of Milton. The cries of sav- 
 age man, the language-symbols of the early 
 Aryans, and the multiform and complicated 
 tongues of modern Europe, all so seemingly 
 diverse to the ear and to the eye, have been 
 the foundation for the sure laws of compara- 
 tive philology that the labors of Bopp and 
 Grimm and Verner have erected upon them. 
 All these, and the many triumphs like them, 
 are victories of insight ; each marks a new 
 stage in the conquering progress of the 
 reason, by which it finds itself in every part 
 and in every phase of the cosmos and its 
 life. 
 
 The insight as to self-activity and the pri- 
 macy of reflective thought, I regard as the 
 profoundest that philosophy has to offer ; and, 
 instead of being urged, as in centuries past, in 
 antagonism to the teachings of science, it is 
 now becoming the joint conclusion of philoso- 
 phy and science together. It is thought that
 
 48 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 pulsates in the world's grandest poetry and in 
 its most exquisite art. It is the very soul of 
 the verse of Homer and of Dante, of Shaks- 
 pere and of Goethe. It makes the marble 
 of Phidias glow with life, and it guides the 
 hands of Raphael and Michael Angelo as they 
 trace their wondrous figures with the brush. 
 It gives immortality to the most beautiful 
 of temples, the Parthenon; and it is the inspi- 
 ration of that superb mediaeval architecture, 
 which bears the name of the conquerors of 
 Home, and which has given to Northern 
 Europe its grandest monuments to the reli- 
 gious aspiration and devotion of the Middle 
 Ages. 
 
 What, then, does this primacy of thought 
 signify, and what is its bearing upon our educa- 
 tional ideals ? Obviously the possession of a 
 conclusion such as this, wrested from nature by 
 the hand of science and from history by that of 
 philosophy, must serve in many ways to guide 
 us in estimating the importance of human insti- 
 tutions and of educational instruments. We 
 cannot accept either of these, without question, 
 from the hands of a tradition to which our
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 49 
 
 modern philosophy and our modern science were 
 wholly unknown ; nor can we blindly follow 
 those believers in a crude psychology who 
 would present us with so many mental facul- 
 ties to be trained, each by its appropriate formal 
 exercise, as if they were sticks of wood to be 
 shaped and reduced to symmetry and order. 
 Mental life, as Wundt so forcibly says, u does 
 not consist in the connection of unalterable 
 objects and varying conditions : in all its 
 phases it is process ; an active, not a pas- 
 sive, existence ; development, not stagnation." 1 
 Herein is mental life true to nature. Like 
 nature, it is not fixed, but ever changing, and 
 this unceasing change, necessary to both 
 growth and development, gives to life both its 
 reality and its pathos. It gives also to edu- 
 cation its unending character, and to mankind 
 the clew to education's wisest processes. 
 
 The question that I am asking what 
 knowledge is of most worth? is a very old 
 one, and the answers to it which have been 
 handed down through the centuries are many 
 
 1 Lectures on human and animal psychology (New York, 
 1804), p. 464.
 
 50 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 and various. It is a question which each age 
 must put to itself, and answer from the stand- 
 point of its deepest and widest knowledge. 
 The wisest philosophers have always seen, 
 more or less clearly, the far-reaching character 
 of the question and the great importance of 
 the answer. Socrates and Plato, Augustine 
 and Aquinas, were under no illusions as to it ; 
 but often in later years the deeper questions 
 relating to the relative worth of subjects of 
 study have been either entirely lost sight of 
 or very superficially dealt with. Bacon clothes 
 in attractive axiomatic form some very crude 
 judgments as to the relative worth of studies. 
 Rousseau outlines an educational programme 
 that ruined his reputation for sobriety of judg- 
 ment. Herbert Spencer turns aside for a 
 moment from his life-work to apotheosize sci- 
 ence in education, although science is, by his 
 own definition, only partially unified know- 
 ledge. Whewell exalts mathematics in lan- 
 guage only less extravagant than that in which 
 Sir William Hamilton decries it. In similar 
 fashion, others, holding a brief for some par- 
 ticular phase or department of knowledge,
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 51 
 
 have come forward crying Eureka ! and pro- 
 claiming that the value of all studies must be 
 measured in terms of their newly-discovered 
 standard. The very latest cry is that studies 
 and intellectual exercises are valuable in pro- 
 portion as they stimulate enlarged brain-areas, 
 thus making the appreciation of Shakspere, of 
 Beethoven, and of Leonardo da Vinci solely a 
 function of the circulation of the blood. 
 
 But to sciolists of this type philosophy and 
 science can now make common answer. If it 
 be true that spirit and reason rule the uni- 
 verse, then the highest and most enduring 
 knowledge is of the things of the spirit. That 
 subtle sense of the beautiful and the sublime 
 which accompanies spiritual insight, and is 
 part of it, this is the highest achievement 
 of which humanity is capable. It is typified, 
 in various forms, in the verse of Dante and 
 the prose of Thomas a Kempis, in the Sistine 
 Madonna of Raphael, and in Mozart's Re- 
 quiem. To develop this sense in education 
 is the task of art and literature, to interpret 
 it is the work of philosophy, and to nourish 
 it the function of religion. Because it most
 
 52 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 fully represents the higher nature of man, it is 
 man's highest possession, and those studies 
 that directly appeal to it and instruct it are 
 beyond compare the most valuable. This has 
 been eloquently and beautifully illustrated by 
 Brother Azarias. " Take a Raphael or a 
 Murillo," he says. 1 "We gaze upon the 
 painted canvas till its beauty has entered our 
 soul. The splendor of the beauty lights up 
 within us depths unrevealed, and far down in 
 our inner consciousness we discover something 
 that responds to the beauty on which we have 
 been gazing. It is as though a former friend 
 revealed himself to us. There is here a recog- 
 nition. The more careful has been our sense- 
 culture, the more delicately have our feelings 
 been attuned to respond to a thing of beauty 
 and find in it a joy forever, all the sooner and 
 the more intensely do we experience this recog- 
 nition. And therewith comes a vague yearn- 
 ing, a longing as for something. What does it 
 all mean? The recognition is of the ideal." 
 Toward the full recognition and appreciation 
 
 1 Phases of thought and criticism (New York, 1892), 
 pp. 67, 68.
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 58 
 
 of this insight into the great works of the 
 spirit, whether recorded in literature, in art, 
 or in institutional life, higher education should 
 bend all its energies. The study of philosophy 
 itself, or the truly philosophic study of any 
 department of knowledge however remote its 
 beginnings may seem to be will accomplish 
 this end. The ways of approach to this goal 
 are as many as there are human interests, for 
 they are all bound together in the bonds of 
 a common origin and a common purpose. The 
 attainment of it is true culture, as Matthew 
 Arnold has defined it : " the acquainting our- 
 selves with the best that has been known and 
 said in the world, and thus with the history of 
 the human spirit." 1 
 
 We now come in sight of the element of truth 
 and permanence in that Humanism which Pe- 
 trarch and Erasmus spread over Europe with 
 such high hopes and excellent intentions ; but 
 which Sturm, the Strassburg schoolmaster, re- 
 duced to the dead, mechanical forms and the 
 crude verbalism that bound the schools in fet- 
 ters for centuries. Of Humanism itself we 
 1 Preface to Literature and dogma (New York, 1889), p. xi.
 
 64 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 may say, as Pater says of the Renaissance of 
 the fifteenth century, that " it was great rather 
 by what it designed than by what it achieved. 
 Much which it aspired to do, and did but im- 
 perfectly or mistakenly, was accomplished in 
 what is called the Sclaircissement of the eigh- 
 teenth century, or in our own generation ; and 
 what really belongs to the revival of the fif- 
 teenth century is but the leading instinct, the 
 curiosity, the initiatory idea." 1 
 
 Many of the representative Humanists were 
 broad-minded men whose sympathies were with 
 learning of every kind. Erasmus himself write*s 
 with enthusiasm of other branches of know- 
 ledge than literature. "Learning," he says, 
 " is springing up all around out of the soil ; 
 languages, physics, mathematics, each depart- 
 ment thriving. Even theology is showing signs 
 of improvement." 2 But unfortunately this 
 broad sympathy with every field of knowledge 
 was not yet widespread. The wonders and 
 splendor of nature that had brought into exist- 
 
 1 Pater, The renaissance (New York, 1888), p. 34. 
 
 2 Froude, Life and letters of Erasmus (New York, 1894), 
 p. 186.
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 55 
 
 ence the earliest religions and the earliest phi- 
 losophies were now feared and despised as the 
 basis of paganism ; and on wholly false grounds 
 a controversy was precipitated as to the relative 
 worth of literature and of science that in one 
 form or another has continued down to our 
 own day. The bitterness with which the con- 
 troversy has been carried on, and the extreme 
 positions assumed by the partisans of the one 
 side or the other, have concealed from view the 
 truth that we are now able to perceive clearly 
 the truth that the indwelling reason, by 
 whom all things are made, is as truly present, 
 though in a different order of manifestation, 
 in the world of nature as in the world of spirit. 
 One side of this truth was expressed by Schel- 
 ling when he taught that nature is the em- 
 bryonic life of spirit, and by Froebel when he 
 wrote, " The spirit of God rests in nature, lives 
 and reigns in nature, is expressed in nature, is 
 communicated by nature, is developed and cul- 
 tivated in nature." * The controversy as to 
 the educational value of science, so far, at least, 
 
 1 Education of man, translated by W. N. Hailmann, 
 (New York, 1887), p. 154.
 
 56 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 as it concerns educational standards and ideals, 
 is, then, an illusory one. It is a mimic war, 
 with words alone as weapons, that is fought 
 either to expel nature from education or to 
 subordinate all else in education to it. We 
 should rather say, in the stately verse of 
 Milton : 
 
 " Accuse not Nature : she bath done her part ; 
 Do thou but thine." 
 
 And that part is surely to study nature joy- 
 fully, earnestly, reverently, as a mighty mani- 
 festation of the power and grandeur of the 
 same spirit that finds expression in human 
 achievement. We must enlarge, then, our 
 conception of the humanities, for humanity is 
 broader and deeper than we have hitherto sus- 
 pected. It touches the universe at many more 
 points than one ; and, properly interpreted, 
 the study of nature may be classed among the 
 humanities as truly as the study of language 
 itself. 
 
 This conclusion, which would welcome sci- 
 ence with open arms into the school and util- 
 ize its opportunities and advantages at every
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 57 
 
 stage of education, does not mean that all 
 studies are of equal educational value, or that 
 they are mutually and indifferently inter- 
 changeable, as are the parts of some machines. 
 It means rather that the study of nature is 
 entitled to recognition on grounds similar to 
 those put forward for the study of literature, 
 of art, and of history. But among themselves 
 these divisions of knowledge fall into an order 
 of excellence as educational material that is 
 determined by their respective relations to the 
 development of the reflective reason. The 
 application of this test must inevitably lead 
 us, while honoring science and insisting upon 
 its study, to place above it the study of his- 
 tory, of literature, of art, and of institutional 
 life. But these studies may not for a moment 
 be carried on without the study of nature or 
 in neglect of it. They are all humanities in 
 the truest sense, and it is a false philosophy 
 of education that would cut us off from any 
 one of them or that would deny the common 
 ground on which they rest. In every field of 
 knowledge what we are studying is some law 
 or phase of energy, and the original as well as
 
 58 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 the highest energy is will. In the world of 
 nature it is exhibited in one series of forms, 
 those which produce the results known to 
 us as chemical, physical, biological ; in the 
 history of mankind, it is manifested in the 
 forms of feelings, thoughts, deeds, institutions. 
 Because the elements of self-consciousness and 
 reflection are present in the latter series and 
 absent in the former, it is to these and the 
 knowledge of them that we must accord the 
 first place in any table of educational values. 
 But education, as Mr. Froude has reminded 
 us, 1 has two aspects. " On one side it is the 
 cultivation of man's reason, the development 
 of his spiritual nature. It elevates him above 
 the pressure of material interests. It makes 
 him superior to the pleasures and pains of a 
 world which is but his temporary home, in 
 filling his mind with higher subjects than the 
 occupations of life would themselves provide 
 him with." It is this aspect of education that 
 I have been considering, for it is from this 
 aspect that we derive our inspiration and our 
 
 1 Short studies on great subjects (New York, 1872), II, 
 257.
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 59 
 
 ideals. "But," continues Mr. Froude, "a life 
 of speculation to the multitude would be a 
 life of idleness and uselessness. They have 
 to maintain themselves in industrious inde- 
 pendence in a world in which it has been 
 said there are but three possible modes of 
 existence begging, stealing, and working ; 
 and education means also the equipping a 
 man with means to earn his own living." It 
 is this latter and very practical aspect of edu- 
 cation that causes us to feel at times the full 
 force of the question of worth in education. 
 Immediate utility makes demands upon the 
 school which it is unable wholly to neglect. 
 If the school is to be the training-ground for 
 citizenship, its products must be usefully and 
 soundly equipped as well as well disciplined 
 and well informed. An educated proletariat 
 to use the forcible paradox of Bismarck 
 is a continual source of disturbance and dan- 
 ger to any nation. Acting upon this convic- 
 tion, the great modern democracies and the 
 time seems to have come when a democracy 
 may be defined as a government, of any form, 
 in which public opinion habitually rules are
 
 60 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 everywhere having a care that in education 
 provision be made for the practical, or immedi- 
 ately useful. This is as it should be, but it 
 exposes the school to a new series of dangers 
 against which it must guard. Utility is a 
 term that may be given either a very broad 
 or a very narrow meaning. There are utilities 
 higher and utilities lower, and under no cir- 
 cumstances will the true teacher ever permit 
 the former to be sacrificed to the latter. This 
 would be done if, in its zeal for fitting the 
 child for self-support, the school were to neg- 
 lect to lay the foundation for that higher 
 intellectual and spiritual life which consti- 
 tutes humanity's full stature. This founda- 
 tion is made ready only if proper emphasis 
 be laid, from the kindergarten to the college, 
 on those studies whose subject-matter is the 
 direct product of intelligence and will, and 
 which can, therefore, make direct appeal to 
 man's higher nature. The sciences and their 
 applications are capable of use, even from the 
 standpoint of this higher order of utilities, 
 because of the reason they exhibit and reveal. 
 Man's rational freedom is the goal, and the
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 61 
 
 sciences are the lower steps on the ladder 
 that reaches to it. 
 
 A splendid confirmation of this view of sci- 
 ence is found in the great Belfast address in 
 which Professor Tyndall stormed the strong- 
 holds of prejudice one and twenty years ago. 
 Said Professor Tyndall : * 
 
 " Science itself not unfrequently derives motive 
 power from an ultra-scientific source. Some of its 
 greatest discoveries have been made under the 
 stimulus of a non-scientific ideal. This was the 
 case amongst the ancients, and it has been so 
 amongst ourselves. Mayer, Joule, and Colding, 
 whose names are associated with the greatest 
 of modern generalizations, were thus influenced. 
 With his usual insight, Lange at one place re- 
 marks that 'it is not always the objectively cor- 
 rect and intelligible that helps man most, or leads 
 most quickly to the fullest and truest knowledge. 
 As the sliding body upon the brachystochrone 
 reaches its end sooner than by the straighter road 
 of the inclined plane, so through the swing of 
 the ideal we often arrive at the naked truth 
 more rapidly than by the more direct processes 
 of the understanding.' Whewell speaks of en- 
 
 1 Presidential address, British Association for the Ad- 
 vancement of Science, Belfast, 1874.
 
 62 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 thusiasni of temper as a hindrance to science; 
 but he means the enthusiasm of weak heads. 
 There is a strong and resolute enthusiasm in 
 which science finds an ally ; and it is to the 
 lowering of this fire, rather than to the diminu- 
 tion of intellectual insight, that the lessening 
 productiveness of men of science in their mature 
 years is to be ascribed. Mr. Buckle sought to 
 detach intellectual achievement from moral force. 
 He gravely erred; for without moral force to 
 whip it into action, the achievements of the in- 
 tellect would be poor indeed. 
 
 "It has been said that science divorces itself 
 from literature; but the statement, like so many 
 others, arises from lack of knowledge. A glance at 
 the less technical writings of its leaders of its 
 Helmholtz, its Huxley, and its du Bois-Eeymond 
 would show what breadth of literary culture they 
 command. Where among modern writers can you 
 find their superiors in clearness and vigor of liter- 
 ary style ? Science desires not isolation, but freely 
 combines with every effort toward the bettering of 
 man's estate. Single-handed, and supported not by 
 outward sympathy, but by inward force, it has 
 built at least one great wing of the many-man- 
 sioned home which man in his totality demands. 
 And if rough walls and protruding rafter-ends in- 
 dicate that on one side the edifice is still incom- 
 plete, it is only by wise combination of the parts
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 63 
 
 required with those already irrevocably built that 
 we can hope for completeness. There is no neces- 
 sary incongruity between what has been accom- 
 plished and what remains to be done. The moral 
 glow of Socrates, which we all feel by ignition, has 
 in it nothing incompatible with the physics of 
 Anaxagoras which he so much scorned, but which 
 he would hardly scorn to-day. . . . 
 
 " The world embraces not only a Newton, but a 
 Shakspere not only a Boyle, but a Raphael not 
 only a Kant, but a Beethoven not only a Darwin, 
 but a Carlyle. Not in each of these, but in all, is 
 human nature whole. They are not opposed, but 
 supplementary not mutually exclusive, but recon- 
 cilable. And if, unsatisfied with them all, the 
 human mind, with the yearning of a pilgrim for his 
 distant home, will still turn to the Mystery from 
 which it has emerged, seeking so to fashion it as 
 to give unity to thought and faith, so long as this 
 is done, not only without intolerance or bigotry of 
 any kind, but with the enlightened recognition 
 that ultimate fixity of conception is here unattain- 
 able, and that each succeeding age must be held 
 free to fashion the mystery in accordance with its 
 own needs then, casting aside all the restrictions 
 of Materialism, I would affirm this to be a field for 
 the noblest exercise of what, in contrast with the 
 knowing faculties, may be called the creative facul- 
 ties of man."
 
 64 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 Close as are man's structural relations to the 
 lower animals, his equipment is peculiar to 
 himself. The actions of the lower animals are 
 conditioned by sensations and momentary im- 
 pulses. Man, on the other hand, is enabled to 
 raise himself above fleeting sensations to the 
 realm of ideas, and in that realm he finds his 
 real life. Similarly, man's will gradually frees 
 itself from bondage to a chain of causes deter- 
 mined for it from without, and attains to a 
 power of independent self-determination ac- 
 cording to durable and continuing ends of 
 action. This constitutes character, which, in 
 Emerson's fine phrase, is the moral order seen 
 through the medium of an individual nature. 
 Freedom of the will is not, then, a metaphysical 
 notion, nor is it obtained from nature or seen 
 in nature. It is a development in the life of 
 the human soul. Freedom and rationality are 
 two names for the same thing, and their high- 
 est development is the end of human life. 
 This development is not, as Locke thought, a 
 process arising without the mind and acting 
 upon it, a passive and pliable recipient. Much 
 less is it one that could be induced in the
 
 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 65 
 
 hypothetical statue of Condillac and Bonnet. 
 It is the very life of the soul itself. 
 
 There is a striking passage in The Mar- 
 ble Faun in which Hawthorne suggests the 
 idea that the task of the sculptor is not, by 
 carving, to impress a figure upon the marble, 
 but rather, by the touch of genius, to set free 
 the glorious form that the cold grasp of the 
 stone imprisons.* With similar insight, Brown- 
 ing puts these words into the mouth of his 
 Paracelsus : 
 
 " Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no rise 
 From outward things, whate'er you may believe. 
 There is an inmost centre in us all, 
 Where truth abides in fullness ; and around, 
 Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 
 This perfect, clear perception. . . . 
 
 . . . And, to know, 
 Rather consists in opening out a way 
 Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, 
 Than in effecting entry for a bight 
 Supposed to be without." 
 
 This is the poetical form of the truth that I 
 believe is pointed to by both philosophy and 
 science. It offers us a sure standing-ground 
 for our educational theory. It reveals to us,
 
 66 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 
 
 not as an hypothesis but as a fact, education as 
 spiritual growth toward intellectual and moral 
 perfection, and saves us from the peril of view- 
 ing it as an artificial process according to me- 
 chanical formulas. Finally, it assures us that 
 while no knowledge is worthless, for it all 
 leads us back to the common cause and ground 
 of all, yet that knowledge is of most worth 
 which stands in closest relation to the highest 
 forms of the activity of that spirit which is 
 created in the image of Him who holds nature 
 and man alike in the hollow of his hand.
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION?
 
 Presidential Address 
 
 delivered before the 
 
 Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools 
 
 of the Middle States and Maryland, 
 
 at Easton, Pennsylvania, November 29, 1895
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 
 
 The title of this discussion is designedly 
 thrown into the form of a question. Its pur- 
 pose is to provoke, if possible, a difference of 
 opinion always a healthier and more produc- 
 tive intellectual state than the dull mediocrity 
 of agreement. Difference of opinion begets 
 doubt, doubt begets inquiry, and inquiry event- 
 ually leads to truth. Virgil's fine line, 
 
 Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, 
 
 is profoundly true ; but more fortunate still is 
 he who comes to his knowledge by the sure 
 method of honest doubt. 
 
 For a generation we have been doing lip-ser- 
 vice to the doctrine of evolution ; but only 
 with great slowness and difficulty do old forms 
 of speech and old habits of mind fit themselves 
 to a new point of view that makes so strong an 
 69
 
 70 IS THEKE A NEW EDUCATION? 
 
 appeal both to our reason and to our imagina- 
 tion. In no department of knowledge is this 
 more true than in the field of education. Edu- 
 cation is essentially a conservative process ; it 
 cherishes its time-worn instruments and re- 
 veres its time-honored standards. The treas- 
 ures of the mind are too precious to be lightly fl 
 exposed to the loss or harm that might come to 
 them through change. Yet the opinion has i 
 found lodgment among our craft that after all, 
 and despite the excellence of old methods and 
 old standards, the educational theory and prac- 
 tice of a given age or generation must stand in 
 close relation to its intellectual and ethical 
 ideals and to the material fabric of its civiliza- 
 tion : and surely all three of these habitually 
 vary, not only over long periods but in rela 
 tively short intervals of time. It is a grave 
 matter for the teacher if virtue is identical with 
 knowledge, as Socrates taught ; or if it is the 
 result of habit, as Aristotle held ; or if it is the 
 cunning invention of rulers, as Mandeville sug- 
 gested ; or if it is mere skill in calculating the 
 chances of pleasure and pain, as Bentham laid 
 down. It is important, too, primarily for the
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 71 
 
 higher education, but eventually for the lower 
 schools as well, if our intellectual ideal is repre- 
 sented by the active mind of a Leibniz or a 
 Gladstone, with its immense energy and broad 
 range of interests ; or if it is better typified by 
 the narrow, plodding specialization of a Darwin 
 or of those Teutonic philologers who are un- 
 duly distracted if their investigations cover 
 more than the gerund or the dative case. Still 
 more directly must our education depend upon 
 the material equipment of the time. In this 
 day of innumerable printing-presses, with a 
 power of production sadly out of proportion to 
 their power of discrimination, it is quite incon- 
 ceivable that we should not find ourselves 
 forced to con anew the grounds on which rest 
 the principles and methods that have come 
 down to us from the age of manuscripts and 
 pack-saddles. Such a process of questioning 
 has been under way for some time past, and 
 has contributed in no small degree to that 
 marvellous enthusiasm for education and to 
 that belief in it, the evidences of which are to 
 be seen on every hand. 
 
 There are three avenues of scientific ap-
 
 72 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 
 
 proach to the study of education, and in each 
 of them the evolutionary point of view is not 
 only illuminating but controlling. These three 
 avenues are the physiological, the psychologi- 
 cal, and the sociological. Their points of con- 
 tact are many and their inter-relations are 
 close. Modern psychology has already given 
 up the attempt to treat mental life without 
 reference to its physical basis ; and it will 
 sooner or later regard any interpretation as 
 incomplete that does not relate the individual 
 to what may be called the social life or con- 
 sciousness. Man's institutional life is as much a 
 part of his real self as his physical existence or his 
 mental constitution. Robinson Crusoe is, in one 
 of the catch phrases of the day, a barren ideality. 
 It must be admitted that this point of view 
 is both very old and very new. It is very old, 
 for it was Aristotle himself who wrote, " Man 
 is by nature a political animal. And he who 
 by nature, and not by mere accident, is without 
 a state, is either above humanity or below it." 1 
 It is also very new, for it is in flat contradic- 
 
 1 The politics of Aristotle, I, 2, Jowett's translation (Ox- 
 ford, 1885), p. 4.
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 73 
 
 tion to the doctrine of Rousseau, "Compelled 
 to oppose nature or our social institutions, we 
 must choose between making a man and a 
 citizen, for we cannot make both at once " 1 
 the crudeness and superficiality of which have 
 not prevented it from exercising a wide and 
 long-continued influence. Modern philosophy 
 confirms here, as so often, the analysis of Aris- 
 totle ; and it rejects, as is becoming customary, 
 the extreme individualism of the later eigh- 
 teenth century. The significance of this for 
 our educational theory is all-important. 
 
 Returning now to the first of the three 
 pillars on which the modern study of education 
 rests the physiological it may be useful to 
 recall briefly what consideration has been given 
 to it in the past. All of the older culture- 
 nations laid stress upon it, and some of them 
 dealt with it in systematic fashion. But the 
 Greeks alone understood the educational value 
 of play. Their great national games combined 
 systematic physical training and play in a way 
 that we have not yet succeeded in equalling. 
 
 1 Rousseau's simile, translated by W. H. Payne (New 
 York, 1893), p. 6.
 
 74 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 
 
 The ascetic ideal that ruled the schools of the 
 Middle Ages left no place for a continuance of 
 the Greek practice, and it was forgotten. We 
 find ourselves to-day struggling to imitate it. 
 In Germany systematic physical training is 
 made much of in education, but genuine play 
 is not prominent. In England, on the contrary, 
 play has been found so successful in developing 
 strength and suppleness of body and sturdy, 
 independent character that anything approach- 
 ing systematic, formal training is regarded as 
 almost unnecessary. In this country the pres- 
 ent tendency is to develop both elements, after 
 the fashion of the Greeks ; and it is to be hoped 
 that the outcome will be even more satisfactory 
 than it was at Athens and at Corinth. 
 
 But physical and physiological considera- 
 tions cut far deeper than this. They demand 
 a hearing when we have under discussion 
 questions of school hours and recesses, of pro- 
 grammes and tasks, of school furniture, of text- 
 books and blackboards, of light, heat, and fresh 
 air. On all of these topics we have recently 
 learned much that has not yet found its way 
 into our practice. College faculties and school
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 75 
 
 teachers, framers of examination tests, donors 
 of laboratories and dormitories, and, most of all, 
 architects, are as a rule oblivious to the vital 
 interest that the pupil has in matters of this 
 kind. Considerations of tradition, conven- 
 ience, cost, and external appearance are al- 
 lowed full swing, and the growing youth must 
 fit the Procrustean bed as best they can. The 
 signs of mal-nutrition and weakness, as de- 
 scribed, for example, by Warner, and the laws 
 of mental and physical fatigue, as arrived at 
 by such investigations as those of Mosso and 
 of Burgerstein, are about as familiar to teach- 
 ers in colleges and in preparatory schools as are 
 the Laws of Manu. And yet they affect vi- 
 tally every young man or young woman who 
 enters a schoolroom or a college. No amount 
 of thundering eloquence on the value of the 
 ancient classics, no emphasis on character as 
 the sole end of education, can make amends 
 for our failure to study the facts dealing with 
 the physical and physiological elements in edu- 
 cation, and for our delay in applying them. 
 We need to be strongly reminded that wicked- 
 ness is closely akin to weakness, and then to
 
 76 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 
 
 consider the moral consequences of our physio- 
 logical ignorance. 1 
 
 The relation of psychology to education is 
 the one subject on which the teacher of to-day 
 is supposed to be informed. Normal schools 
 without number, and here and there a college, 
 give definite instruction in the subject. Yet 
 a careful inspection of the most popular text- 
 books in use, and visits to some hundreds of 
 classrooms, have convinced me that the results 
 of this knowledge, if it exists, are, in the field 
 of secondary and higher education, almost nil. 
 In this respect the elementary teacher is far 
 in advance. Perhaps no secondary school or 
 college in America can show teaching to com- 
 pare, in mastery of scientific method and in 
 technical skill, with the best teaching to be 
 seen in many of the public elementary schools, 
 particularly in the Western States. In con- 
 sequence of this, we may safely assume that 
 pupils fresh from the vigorous intellectual and 
 moral growth of a well-conducted elementary 
 school, will turn aside from the machine meth- 
 
 1 Compare "Moral education and will -training," by G. 
 Stanley Hall, in Pedagogical Seminary, II, 72-89.
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 77 
 
 ods and dull, uninspiring class-exercises of our 
 average academy with disgust. The new edu- 
 cational life-blood is flowing most freely and 
 vigorously in the veins of the elementary 
 teacher. Here and there a secondary school- 
 master, and here and there a college president 
 or professor, takes a genuine and intelligent 
 interest in education for its own sake; but 
 the vast majority know nothing of it and are 
 but little affected by it. They are content to 
 accumulate what they are pleased to term " ex- 
 perience " ; but their relation to education is 
 just that of the motorman on a trolley-car to 
 the science of electricity. They use it; but 
 of its nature, principles, and processes they 
 are profoundly ignorant. The one qualifica- 
 tion most to be feared in a teacher, and the 
 one to be most carefully inquired into, is this 
 same "experience" when it stands alone. I 
 am profoundly distrustful of it. The pure 
 empiricist never can have any genuine experi- 
 ence, any more than an animal, because he is 
 unable to interrogate the phenomena that pre- 
 sent themselves to him, and hence is unable to 
 understand them. The scientific teacher, the
 
 78 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 
 
 
 theorist, on the contrary, asks what manner 
 
 of phenomena these are that are before him, 
 what are their inner relations, and the princi- 
 ples on which they are based. This, of course, 
 is the first great step, taken by all scientific 
 method, toward a knowledge of causes. It is 
 at this point that we reach the real reason 
 for the need of an accurate knowledge of 
 psychology on the part of the teacher. His 
 dealings in the schoolroom are primarily with 
 mental processes and mental growth. Unless 
 these are scientifically studied and understood, 
 or and this does not happen often unless 
 natural psychological insight comes to the res- 
 cue of psychological ignorance, the teaching 
 is bound to be mechanical ; and the longer it 
 is continued, the more " experience " is ac- 
 quired, and the more wooden and mechanical 
 it becomes. 
 
 A short time ago I was present at an exer- 
 cise in modern history, given to an undergrad- 
 uate class, averaging over eighteen years of 
 age, in one of our Eastern colleges. The 
 text-book in the hands of the students was 
 of a very elementary character, and is much
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 79 
 
 used in public high schools, both East and 
 West. The teacher was a college graduate, 
 and had held his position for several years. 
 These years had been years of "experience," 
 and would have been strongly urged as an 
 important qualification had his name been 
 under consideration for promotion or for trans- 
 fer to another institution. Yet the entire 
 hour that I spent in his class was given up 
 to the dictation of an abstract of the text- 
 book. This, he told me, was his usual method. 
 The students took down the dictation, word 
 for word, in a dull, listless way, and gave a 
 sigh of mingled despair and relief when it 
 came to an end. This process went on sev- 
 eral times weekly for either one or two years. 
 I ascertained from the instructor that he called 
 it "hammering the facts home." He is, for 
 aught I know, " hammering " yet, and now has 
 some additional " experience " to his credit. So 
 have his pupils. 
 
 Not long ago a prominent publishing firm 
 issued a widely advertised text-book on a 
 subject much taught nowadays. For the pur- 
 poses of real teaching, of arousing interest and
 
 80 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 
 
 enthusiasm in the subject, and of stimulating 
 the student to pursue it farther, to reflect upon 
 it, and to make its lessons his own, it was as 
 ill-adapted as any printed matter occupying 
 the same number of pages could be. As a 
 compendium of bare facts and dates to be 
 committed to memory, and reproduced in an- 
 swer to definite questions, it was clear and 
 concise. Despite this fact, the publishers have 
 recently issued a circular commendatory of 
 the book, that contains two-score cordial in- 
 dorsements of it as a text-book, over the sig- 
 natures of as many high-school and college 
 teachers. I interpret that to mean that those 
 two-score teachers lack either educational intel- 
 ligence or educational conscience ; perhaps both. 
 No amount of psychological learning could 
 make it impossible for the inquirer to find 
 cases like these, and the hundreds of others 
 of which they are typical, in the schools and 
 colleges ; but a psychological training on the 
 part of the teacher would go far to diminish 
 their number. Professor Royce pointed out * 
 
 1 " Is there a science of education ? " in Educational 2?e- 
 view, I, 16-25 ; 121-132.
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 81 
 
 several years ago that what the teacher has 
 chiefly to gain from the study of psychology 
 is, not rules of procedure, but the psychologi- 
 cal spirit. The teacher, he adds, should be a 
 naturalist and cultivate the habit of observing 
 the mental life of his pupils for its own sake. 
 In this he will follow the method common to 
 all naturalists : " What is here in this live 
 thing ? Why does it move tjius ? What is it 
 doing ? What feelings does it appear to have ? 
 What type of rudimentary intelligence is it 
 showing ? " Such questions as these form the 
 habit of watching minds, and of watching 
 them closely. This habit is the surest road 
 to good teaching, and its formation is the 
 best service that psychology can render to 
 the classroom. Until a teacher has acquired 
 that habit and subordinated his schoolroom 
 procedure to it, he is not teaching at all ; 
 at best he is either lecturing or hearing 
 recitations. 
 
 We are chiefly indebted to the students and 
 followers of Herbart for the present wide- 
 spread interest in this country in two psycho- 
 logical doctrines of the greatest importance
 
 82 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 
 
 for all teaching the doctrine of appercep- 
 tion and the doctrine of interest. The former 
 has to do with mental assimilation, the latter 
 with the building of character and ideals. I 
 know of no more fruitful field for the appli- 
 cation of both of these than the freshman 
 year of the college course. My observation 
 has taught me that the work of the freshman 
 class in college is, as a rule, very ineffective. 
 College teachers who admit this fact are in 
 the habit of accounting for it by alleging the 
 difficulty of welding into a homogeneous mass 
 the new students of different advantages, 
 training, and mental habits. The task is 
 more than difficult ; it is impossible, and 
 ought never to be attempted, much less en- 
 couraged. That it goes on year after year 
 in a hundred colleges is due to the strait- 
 jacket system of class teaching by which we 
 defy the rules of God and man to the glory 
 of what, in our professional cant, we call 
 "sound education." If we could secure a 
 hearing for the doctrine of apperception, all 
 this would be changed. We should then recog- 
 nize in our practice as we do in our faith
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 83 
 
 that the mind is not a passive recipient of 
 the impressions that reach it ; that it reacts 
 upon them, colors them, and makes them a 
 part of itself in accordance with the ten- 
 dency, the point of view, and the possessions 
 that it already has. This tendency, this point 
 of view, and these possessions differ in the 
 case of every individual. Instead of over- 
 looking or seeking to annul these differences, 
 we should first understand them and then 
 base our teaching upon them. If the first 
 month of freshman year were spent in care- 
 fully ascertaining the stage of development, 
 in power and acquirement, that each pupil 
 had reached, it would be possible so to order 
 and adjust the work of the year as to make 
 it useful and educative. I have known case 
 after case in which the opposite policy of 
 treating all upon one plane, and making the 
 same demands upon aH, has made a college 
 course a source of positive harm ; it also 
 accounts, in greater measure than we are 
 aware of, for the large proportion of students 
 who fall away at the end of the freshman 
 and sophomore years. Yet so long as college
 
 84 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 
 
 teachers know so little psychology as to cling 
 to the old dogma of formal discipline, and 
 continue to pound away on so much mathe- 
 matics to train the reasoning powers and so 
 much Greek grammar to train something else, 
 regardless of the content of the instruction 
 and of all other considerations just so long 
 will one mind be lost or injured for every 
 one that is saved or benefited. As Colonel 
 Parker has so forcibly said, "We dwell on 
 those who have been saved by our older 
 methods, but who has counted the lost ? " 
 
 The situation is not very different with re- 
 spect to the doctrine of interest. We con- 
 tinually complain that valuable and necessary 
 instruction given in school and in college is for- 
 gotten, that it is not retained, not extended, and 
 not applied. The fault lies partly, no doubt, 
 with the pupils, but largely with ourselves. 
 We have still to learn what interest means, 
 how it is changed from indirect to direct, and 
 how it is built up into a permanent element 
 of character. We are inexperienced in seeking 
 out and seizing upon the present and tempo- 
 rary interests of the student, and in using
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 85 
 
 them as a factor in training. It is a com- 
 mon thing to hear it said that since life is 
 full of obstacles and character is strength- 
 ened by overcoming them, so the school and 
 college course should not hesitate to compel 
 students to do distasteful and difficult things 
 simply because they are distasteful and diffi- 
 cult. I do not hesitate to say that I believe 
 that doctrine to be profoundly immoral and 
 its consequences calamitous. But, it is an- 
 swered, you certainly would not trust to a 
 student's whims and allow him to do or not 
 do as he pleases. Certainly not ; and that is 
 not the alternative. The proper and scien- 
 tific course is to search for the pupil's em- 
 pirical and natural interests, and to build 
 upon them. This is not always easy; it re- 
 quires knowledge, patience, and skill. It is 
 far easier to treat the entire class alike and 
 to drive them over the hurdles set by a sin- 
 gle required course of study, in the vain 
 hope that the weak and timid will not be 
 injured as much as the strong and confident 
 will be benefited, and that somehow or other 
 the algebraic sum of the results of the process
 
 86 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 
 
 will bear a positive sign. I earnestly com- 
 mend to every teacher the study of these 
 two principles, apperception and interest. I 
 do so in the firm belief that the practical 
 result of that study would be an immense 
 uplifting of the teaching efficiency of every 
 educational institution in the United States. 
 What, for lack of a better term, I call the 
 sociological aspect of education is, in many 
 respects, the most important of all. Under 
 this head are to be put such questions as those 
 that deal with the aim and limits of education, 
 its relation to the state, its organization and 
 administration, and the course of study to be 
 pursued. I can now refer to but a single one of 
 these topics. Dr. Harris, in the opening para- 
 graphs of his well-known report on the correla- 
 tion of studies, dealt a final blow to the idea 
 that the course of study is to be settled either 
 by tradition or by conditions wholly psycho- 
 logical. " The game of chess," he points out, 1 
 " would furnish a good course of study for the 
 discipline of the powers of attention and calcu- 
 
 1 Beport of the Committee of Fifteen on elementary edu- 
 cation (New York, 1895), p. 42.
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 87 
 
 lation of abstract combinations, but it would 
 give its possessor little or no knowledge of 
 man or nature. . . . Psychology of both 
 kinds, physiological and introspective, can hold 
 only a subordinate place in the settlement of 
 questions relating to the correlation of stud- 
 ies." He also shows that the chief considera- 
 tion to which all others are to be subordinated 
 is the "requirement of the civilization into 
 which the child is born, as determining not 
 only what he shall study in school, but what 
 habits and customs he shall be taught in the 
 family before the school age arrives ; as well as 
 that he shall acquire a skilled acquaintance with 
 some one of a definite series of trades, profes- 
 sions, or vocations in the years that follow 
 school ; and, furthermore, that this question of 
 the relation of the pupil to his civilization de- 
 termines what political duties he shall assume 
 and what religious faith or spiritual aspirations 
 shall be adopted for the conduct of his life." 1 
 
 It is at this point that the study of education 
 from the sociological point of view begins. 
 
 1 Report of the Committee of Fifteen on elementary edu- 
 cation (New York, 1895), p. 41.
 
 88 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 
 
 Instead of forcing the course of study to suit 
 the necessities of some preconceived system 
 of educational organization, it should deter- 
 mine and control that organization absolutely. 
 Were this done, the troubles of the secondary 
 school, the Cinderella of our educational system, 
 would disappear. Just at present it is jammed 
 into the space left between the elementary 
 school and the college, without any rational and 
 ordered relation to either. The ever-present 
 problem of college entrance is purely artificial, 
 and has no business to exist at all. We have 
 ingeniously created it, and are much less in- 
 geniously trying to solve it. Leibniz might 
 have said that mental development, as well as 
 nature, never makes leaps. It is constant and 
 continuous. The idea that there is a great gulf 
 fixed between the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 years, or between the seventeenth and eigh- 
 teenth, that nothing but a college entrance ex- 
 amination can bridge, is a mere superstition that 
 not even age can make respectable. It ought to 
 be as easy and natural for the student to pass 
 from the secondary school to the college as it is 
 for him to pass from one class to another in the
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 89 
 
 school or in the college. In like fashion, the 
 work and methods of the one ought to lead 
 easily and gradually to those of the other. That 
 they do not do so in the educational systems of 
 France and Germany is one of the main defects 
 of those systems. The American college as a 
 school of broad and liberal education, a place 
 where studies are carried on with reference to 
 their general and more far-reaching relations, 
 is indispensable for the very reason that it per- 
 mits and encourages the expansion and devel- 
 opment of school work in the widest possible 
 way, before the narrow specialization of the 
 university is entered upon. Happily, there are 
 in the United States no artificial obstacles in- 
 terposed between the college and the univer- 
 sity. We make it very easy to pass from the 
 one to the other ; the custom is to accept any 
 college degree for just what it means. We 
 make it equally easy to pass from one grade or 
 class to another and from elementary school to 
 secondary school, the presumption always being 
 that the pupils are ready and competent to go 
 forward. The barrier between secondary school 
 and college is the only one that we insist upon
 
 90 IS THEKE A NEW EDUCATION? 
 
 retaining. The intending collegian alone is 
 required to run the gantlet of college pro- 
 fessors and tutors, who, in utter ignorance of 
 his character, training, and acquirements, 
 bruise him for hours with such knotty ques- 
 tions as their fancy may suggest. In the 
 interest of an increased college attendance, not 
 to mention that of a sounder educational 
 theory, this practice ought to be stopped and 
 the formal tests at entrance reduced to a 
 minimum. 
 
 Public opinion itself, despite the protests of 
 the pundits of the faculties, is forcing an ex- 
 tension of the course of study. It is one of 
 the best bits of grim humor that our American 
 practice, inherited from the mother country, 
 affords, that the designation "liberal" has 
 come to be claimed as the sole prerogative of a 
 very narrow and technical course of study that 
 was invented for a very narrow and technical 
 purpose, and that has been very imperfectly 
 liberalized in the intervening centuries. It 
 ought to soften somewhat the asperity of 
 teachers of Greek to remember that the very 
 arguments by which they are in the habit of
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 91 
 
 resisting the inroads of the modern languages, 
 the natural sciences, and economics, were used 
 not so many hundreds of years ago to keep 
 Greek itself from edging its way into the cur- 
 riculum at all. Paulsen is indubitably right in 
 his insistence upon the fact that the modern 
 world has developed a culture of its own, 
 which, while an outgrowth of the culture of 
 antiquity, is quite distinct from it. It is to 
 this modern culture that our education must 
 lead. The first question to be asked of any 
 course of study is, Does it lead to a knowledge 
 of our contemporary civilization ? If not, it is 
 neither efficient nor liberal. 
 
 In society as it exists to-day the dominant 
 note, running through all of our struggles and 
 problems, is economic, what the old Greeks 
 might have called political. Yet it is a con- 
 stant fight to get any proper teaching from the 
 economic and social point of view put before 
 high-school and college students. They are 
 considered too young or too immature to study 
 such recondite subjects, although the nice dis- 
 tinctions between the Greek moods and tenses 
 and the principles of conic sections, with their
 
 92 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 
 
 appeal to the highly trained mathematical 
 imagination, are their daily food. As a result, 
 thousands of young men and young women, 
 who have neither the time, the money, nor the 
 desire for a university career, are sent forth 
 from the schools either in profound ignorance 
 of the economic basis of modern society, or 
 with only the most superficial and misleading 
 knowledge of it. The indefensibleness of this 
 policy, even from the most practical point of 
 view, is apparent when we bear in mind that in 
 this country we are in the habit of submitting 
 questions, primarily economic in character, 
 every two or four years to the judgment and 
 votes of what is substantially an untutored 
 mob. If practical politics only dealt with 
 chemistry as well as with economics, we could, 
 by the same short and easy method, come to 
 some definite and authoritative conclusion con- 
 cerning the atomic theory and learn the real 
 facts regarding helium. But since the eco- 
 nomic facts, and not the chemical or linguistic 
 facts, are the ones to be bound up most closely 
 with our public and private life, they should, 
 on that very account, be strongly represented
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 93 
 
 in every curriculum. We can leave questions 
 as to the undulatory theory of light and as to 
 Grimm's and Verne r's laws to the specialists ; 
 but we may not do the same thing with ques- 
 tions as to production and exchange, as to 
 monetary policy and taxation. The course 
 of study is not liberal, in this century, that 
 does not recognize these facts and empha- 
 size economics as it deserves. I cite but this 
 one instance of conflict between the inherited 
 and the scientifically constructed course of 
 study. The argument and its illustration 
 might be much extended. 
 
 I have now indicated how I should answer 
 my own question, and have briefly pointed out 
 typical grounds on which that answer rests. 
 There remains the ungracious duty of adding 
 a word regarding the attitude of college facul- 
 ties and schoolmasters toward the scientific 
 study of education. The recklessness with 
 which the man of letters, sometimes the college 
 president, and now and then even the more 
 canny college professor, will rush into the 
 public discussion of matters of education con- 
 cerning which he has no knowledge whatever,
 
 94 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 
 
 and to which, he has never given a half 
 hour's connected thought, is appalling. Opin- 
 ion serves for information, and prejudice 
 usurps the place of principle. The popular 
 journals and the printed proceedings of educa- 
 tional associations teem with perfectly prepos- 
 terous contributions bearing the signatures of 
 worthy and distinguished men, who would not 
 dream of writing dogmatically upon a physical, 
 a biological, or a linguistic problem. For some 
 recondite reason they face the equally difficult 
 and unfamiliar problems of education without 
 a tremor. The effect is bad enough on the 
 colleges and schools themselves, but it is far 
 worse on the public generally, who are thus 
 led off to the worship of false gods. Even in 
 the largest American institutions, where most 
 is at stake, the men who give any conscientious 
 and prolonged study to education itself, as 
 distinct from the department of knowledge in 
 which their direct work lies, can be counted 
 upon the fingers of one hand. As a conse- 
 quence, many college faculties are no better 
 qualified to decree courses of study and condi- 
 tions of admission than they are to adopt a
 
 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 95 
 
 system of ventilation or of electric lighting. 
 In time, doubtless, this will be recognized, and 
 in the former case, as in the latter, the faculties 
 will submit to be guided by specialists who do 
 know. That will never come to pass, however, 
 until school and college teachers see clearly 
 that scholarship is one thing and knowledge 
 of the educational process quite another; that 
 long service in a school or college is almost 
 as compatible with ignorance of education, 
 scientifically considered, as long residence in 
 a dwelling is compatible with ignorance of ar- 
 chitecture and carpentry. 
 
 Dr. Johnson's acumen was equal to drawing 
 a distinction between the new as the hitherto 
 non-existent, the new as the comparatively re- 
 cent, and the new as the hitherto unfamiliar. 
 In each and all of these senses of the word, I 
 am confident that there is a new education.
 
 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION
 
 An Address 
 
 delivered before the 
 
 National Educational Association 
 
 at Buffalo, New York, July 7, 1896
 
 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 
 
 Philosophers, poets, and sometimes men of 
 science, are fond of speculating on an answer 
 to the question, Whither are we tending? But 
 more personal matters and more immediate in- 
 terests detain the attention of the vast majority 
 of mankind. The mere question of absolute 
 physical direction, to say nothing of the ten- 
 dencies of institutions and ideals, lies far be- 
 yond the range of vision of the average man. 
 The passenger in a railway train moving west 
 may walk leisurely eastward, within the limits 
 of the train, and feel certain of his direction 
 and speed. But the train travelling westward, 
 forty miles an hour, is on the surface of a 
 planet that revolves on its axis from west to 
 east with a velocity of a thousand miles an 
 hour. More than this, the earth is also plung- 
 ing forward in space, in its orbit about the 
 99
 
 100 DEMOCBACY AND EDUCATION 
 
 sun, at the fearful rate of more than 1100 
 miles per minute ; while as a member of the 
 solar system it drifts rapidly with its fellows 
 toward a distant point in the constellation ' 
 Hercules. Perhaps the whole sidereal system, 
 the entire cosmos even, has yet other motions 
 of its own. How hopeless, then, is it to at- 
 tempt to trace the exact path, judged by an 
 absolute standard, of a body moving on the 
 earth's surface ! The very conception staggers 
 us, and our imaginations fall back helpless. 
 
 Nor is it otherwise with the directions and 
 tendencies of things intellectual and institu- 
 tional. The Laudator temporis acti is con- 
 vinced that civilization is just now on a down- 
 ward grade. The old order has changed and 
 given place to a new ; and the new order seems 
 to him to lack something of the robustness, 
 the idealism, the valor, of the old. His an- 
 tagonist, fresh from contemplating the abstract 
 rights of man as depicted by modern political 
 philosophers, sees hope and promise only in 
 the future ; to such an observer the past is a 
 record of folly, imperfection, and crime. The 
 sane man may be forgiven if at times he fails
 
 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 101 
 
 to listen with patience to either advocate. His 
 sanity deserts him, however, if he attempts to 
 take refuge in cynicism and pessimism. While 
 we may not hope to grasp fully the significance 
 of movements of which we ourselves are a part, 
 we can nevertheless study them, trace their 
 beginnings, and measure their present effects. 
 Such an attitude, hopeful yet cautious, leads 
 to the only point of view which is at once 
 scientific and philosophical. 
 
 However difficult it may be to estimate pres- 
 ent tendencies with any precision or authority, 
 there is a widespread instinctive feeling among 
 thoughtful men, as Mr. Kidd has pointed out 
 in the first pages of his Social Evolution, that 
 a definite stage in the evolution of our civiliza- 
 tion is drawing to a close and that we are face 
 to face with a new era. The history of the 
 nineteenth century lends color to the sugges- 
 tion that the new era has already begun. The 
 evidence for this is drawn from the records of 
 material advance, of scientific progress, and of 
 political development. 
 
 The material advances made since the pres- 
 ent century opened are more numerous and
 
 102 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 
 
 more striking than the sum total of those that 
 all previous history records. We find it dim- 
 cult even to imagine the world of our grand- 
 fathers, and almost impossible to appreciate 
 or understand it. Without the factory, with- 
 out the manifold products and applications of 
 steam and electricity, without even the news- 
 paper and the sulphur match, the details of 
 our daily life would be strangely different. 
 In our time wholly new mechanical and eco- 
 nomic forces are actively at work, and have 
 already changed the appearance of the earth's 
 surface. What another hundred years may 
 bring forth no one dares to predict. 
 
 The scientific progress of the century is no 
 less marvellous and no less revolutionary in its 
 effects than the material advance. The neb- 
 ular hypothesis, once the speculative dream 
 of a few mathematicians and philosophers, is 
 now a scientific commonplace. The geology 
 of Lyell, the astronomy of Herschel, the biol- 
 ogy of von Baer, of Darwin, and of Huxley, 
 the physiology of Miiller, the physics of Helm- 
 holtz and of Roentgen, are already part of the 
 common knowledge of all educated men. To
 
 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 103 
 
 us the world and its constitution present an 
 appearance very different from that which was 
 familiar to our ancestors. 
 
 But most striking and impressive of all move- 
 ments of the century is the political develop- 
 ment toward the form of government known 
 as democracy. Steadily and doggedly through- 
 out the ten decades the movement toward de- 
 mocracy has gone its conquering way. When 
 the century opened democracy was a chimera. 
 It had been attempted in Greece and Rome 
 and again in the Middle Ages ; and the reflect- 
 ing portion of mankind believed it to be a 
 failure. Whatever its possibilities in a small 
 and homogeneous community, it was felt to 
 be wholly inapplicable to large states. The 
 contention that government could be carried 
 on by what Mill called collective mediocrity 
 rather than by the intelligent few, was felt 
 to be preposterous. The horrible spectre 
 of the French Revolution was fresh in the 
 minds of men. The United States, hardly 
 risen from their cradle, were regarded by the 
 statesmen of Europe with a curiosity, partly 
 amused, partly disdainful. Germany was gov-
 
 104 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 
 
 erned by an absolute monarch, the grand- 
 nephew of the great Frederick himself. In 
 England a constitutional oligarchy, with Pitt 
 at its head, was firmly intrenched in power. 
 The Napoleonic reaction was in full swing in 
 France. How different will be the spectacle 
 when the twentieth century opens ! In Great 
 Britain one far-reaching reform after another 
 has left standing only the shell of oligarchy; 
 the spirit and support of British civilization 
 are democratic. Despite the influence of Bis- 
 marck and the two Williams, great progress 
 is being made toward the democratization of 
 Germany. France, after a period of unex- 
 ampled trouble and unrest, has founded a suc- 
 cessful and apparently stable republic. The 
 United States have disappointed every foe and 
 falsified the predictions of every hostile critic. 
 The governmental framework constructed by 
 the fathers for less than four millions of people, 
 scattered along a narrow strip of seaboard, has 
 expanded easily to meet the needs of a diverse 
 population twenty times as large, gathered into 
 great cities and distributed over an empire of 
 seacoast, mountain, plain, and forest. It has
 
 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 105 
 
 withstood the shock of the greatest civil war 
 of all time, fought by men of high intelligence 
 and determined convictions. It has permitted 
 the development and expansion of a civili- 
 zation in which there is equality of oppor- 
 tunity for all, and where the highest civil and 
 military honors have been thrust upon the 
 children of the plain people by their grateful 
 fellow-citizens. 
 
 So significant has this phenomenon of de- 
 mocracy become, so widespread is its influence, 
 and so dominating are its ideals, that we have 
 rightly begun to study it both with the im- 
 partial eye of the historian and by the ana- 
 lytic method of the scientist. The literature 
 of democracy for the past half century is ex- 
 tremely important ; and Tocqueville, Bage- 
 hot, Scherer, Carlyle, Maine, Bryce, and Lecky 
 are but a few of the great names that have 
 contributed to it. Through all the pages of 
 these writers runs an expression of the con- 
 viction that the stream of tendency toward 
 democracy can neither be turned back nor 
 permanently checked. Some of these students 
 of democracy are its enthusiastic advocates,
 
 106 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 
 
 others are its hostile critics : all alike seem 
 to resign themselves to it. 
 
 The process of substituting this new social 
 and political system for an older one has not 
 been uninterrupted or untroubled, nor has it 
 given perfect satisfaction. As the political 
 pendulum has continued to swing through a 
 wide but diminishing arc, the cries have 
 been loud and constant that injustice and 
 favoritism have not been suppressed, that all 
 are not equally prosperous, and that not even 
 democracy is a cure for all our distress and 
 dissatisfaction. Much of this is no doubt due 
 to the tendency in all stages of history, spoken 
 of by Burke, to ascribe to prevailing forms 
 of government ills that in reality flow from 
 the constitution of human nature. But in 
 part at least in how great part perhaps we 
 fail to recognize it is due to the imperfect 
 and halting application of our democratic ideals 
 and the very partial acceptance of our dem- 
 ocratic responsibilities. The platitudes of 
 democracy are readily accepted by the crowd ; 
 the full depth of its principles is far from being 
 generally understood. It is easy to cry " Lib-
 
 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 107 
 
 erty, Equality, and Fraternity," and to carve 
 the words in letters of stone upon public 
 buildings and public monuments. It is not 
 so easy to answer the query whether, in truth, 
 unrestricted liberty and perfect equality are 
 at all compatible. For it has been pointed 
 out that liberty leads directly to inequality, 
 based upon the natural differences of capacity 
 and application among men. Equality, on 
 the other hand, in any economic sense, is at- 
 tainable only by the suppression in some 
 degree of liberty, in order that, directly or in- 
 directly, the strong arm of the state may be 
 able to hold back the precocious and to push 
 forward the sluggish. Obviously there is food 
 for thought in this, thought that may serve 
 to check the rhetorical exuberance of the en- 
 thusiast, and lead him to ask whether we yet 
 fully grasp what democracy means. 
 
 Democracy is, as I have said, a movement 
 so novel and so sweeping, that we have 
 not yet had time to compare it closely, in 
 all its phases, with monarchy and oligarchy. 
 The advantages of those forms of political 
 organization were manifest when society was
 
 108 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 
 
 young and man's institutional life yet undevel- 
 oped. As time went on, the weaknesses of 
 such forms of government became apparent. 
 The plunge into democracy was made, and we 
 have usually gone no further than to contrast 
 its blessings with what we know of the op- 
 pression and iniquity that resulted from king- 
 ship and oligarchy in the early modern period. 
 We must, however, go further than this, and 
 gain a truer and deeper insight into the insti- 
 tutional life of which we are a part. 
 
 It is just here that we find evidence of the 
 close relations that exist between democracy 
 and education. So long as the direction of 
 man's institutional life was in the hands of one 
 or the few, the need for a wide diffusion of 
 political intelligence was not strongly felt. 
 The divine right of kings found its correlative 
 in the diabolical ignorance of the masses. 
 There was no educational ideal, resting upon a 
 social and political necessity, that was broad 
 enough to include the whole people. But the 
 rapid widening of the basis of sovereignty has 
 changed all that. No deeper conviction per- 
 vades the people of the United States and of
 
 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 109 
 
 France, who are the most aggressive exponents 
 of democracy, than that the preservation of 
 liberty under the law, and of the institutions 
 that are our precious possession and proud 
 heritage, depends upon the intelligence of the 
 whole people. It is on this unshakable foun- 
 dation that the argument for public education 
 at public expense really rests. 
 
 It was not by accident that the Greek philos- 
 ophers made their contributions to educational 
 theory in treatises on the nature and functions 
 of the state. Both Plato and Aristotle had 
 a deep insight into the meaning of man's social 
 and institutional life. To live together with 
 one's fellows in a community involves fitness 
 so to live. This fitness, in turn, implies disci- 
 pline, instruction, training ; that is, education. 
 The highest type of individual life is found in 
 community life. Ethics passes into or includes 
 politics, and the education of the individual is 
 education for the state. The educated Greek 
 at the height of his country's development was 
 taught to regard participation in the public 
 service alike as a duty and a privilege. The 
 well-being of the community was constantly
 
 110 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 
 
 before him as an ideal of personal conduct. 
 To depart from that point of view is to entail 
 the gravest consequences. That a large pro- 
 portion of our people, and among their number 
 some of the most highly trained, have departed 
 from it, needs no proof. 
 
 Failure to understand the political life of a 
 democratic state and failure to participate fully 
 in it, lead directly to false views of the state 
 and its relations to the individual citizen. In- 
 stead of being regarded as the sum total of 
 the citizens who compose it, the state is, in 
 thought at least, then regarded as an artificial 
 creation, the plaything of so-called politicians 
 and wire-pullers. This view, that the individual 
 and the state are somehow independent each of 
 the other, is not without support in modern 
 political philosophy, but it is a crude and 
 superficial view. It gives rise to those fal- 
 lacies that regard the state either as a tyrant 
 to be resisted or as a benefactor to be courted. 
 No democracy can endure permanently on 
 either basis. The state is the completion of 
 the life of the individual, and without it he 
 would not wholly live. To inculcate that doc-
 
 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 111 
 
 trine should be an aim of all education in a 
 democracy. To live up to it should be the 
 ideal of the nation's educated men. 
 
 Impossible in theory as the separation of the 
 state from the individuals who compose it 
 seems, yet in practice it is found to exist. 
 This is true in the United States, and in some 
 localities more than others. Our constitutional 
 system, elaborately adjusted so that each in- 
 dividual's choice may count in the ascertain- 
 ment of the common will, now shelters a 
 system of party organization and of political 
 practice, undreamt of by the fathers, that 
 effectually reduces our theoretical democracy 
 to an oligarchy, and that oligarchy by no 
 means an aristocracy. With here and there an 
 exception, the educated men of the country 
 hold themselves aloof or are held aloof 
 from participation in what is called practical 
 politics. That field of activity which should 
 attract the highest intelligence of the nation 
 too often repels it. When a man of the most 
 highly trained powers engages in political life, 
 he becomes an object of curiosity and comment. 
 If he despises the petty arts and chicaneries
 
 112 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 
 
 of the demagogue he becomes "unpopular. 5 * 
 After a brief interval he passes off the public 
 stage without even a perfunctory recognition 
 of his services. It is safe to say that the 
 framers of no government, least of all the 
 framers of our own, contemplated a practical 
 outcome such as this. If education and train- 
 ing unfit men for political life, then there is 
 something wrong either with our political life 
 or with our education. 
 
 The teachers of the country should address 
 themselves to this question with determination 
 and zeal. Instruction in civil government is 
 good ; the inculcation of patriotism is good ; 
 the flag upon the schoolhouse is good. But all 
 these devices lie upon the surface. The real 
 question involved is ethical. It reaches deep 
 down to the very foundations of morality. It 
 is illuminated by history. 
 
 The public education of a great democratic 
 people has other aims to fulfil than the exten- 
 sion of scientific knowledge or the development 
 of literary culture. It must prepare for intel- 
 ligent citizenship. More than a century ago 
 Burke wrote that " the generality of people are
 
 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 118 
 
 fifty years, at least, behindhand in their poli- 
 tics. There are but very few who are capable 
 of comparing and digesting what passes before 
 their eyes at different times and occasions, so 
 as to form the whole into a distinct system." 
 This is the warning of one of the greatest of 
 publicists that a thoroughly instructed and 
 competent public opinion on political matters 
 is difficult to attain. Yet, unless we are to 
 surrender the very principle on which democ- 
 racy rests, we must struggle to attain it. 
 Something may be accomplished b} r precept, 
 something by direct instruction, much by 
 example. The words "politics" and "politi- 
 cian" must be rescued from the low esteem 
 into which they have fallen, and restored to 
 their ancient and honorable meaning. It is 
 safe to say that the framers of our Constitu- 
 tion never foresaw that the time would come 
 when thousands of intelligent men and women 
 would regard " politics " as beneath them, and 
 when a cynical unwillingness to participate 
 in the choice of persons and policies would 
 develop among the people. Yet such is, of 
 course, the case. The people of the state of
 
 114 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 
 
 New York will in November next choose a 
 governor. The power and dignity of the 
 office make it one of the greatest in the land. 
 About one and a half million qualified voters 
 will be entitled to participate in the choice. 
 Theoretically any competent person might be 
 put forward for the office, and every indi- 
 vidual's preference would be recorded and 
 weighed. As a matter of fact, however, the 
 choice of the state must be made between two 
 persons, who in turn will be selected by, per- 
 haps, ten per cent, of the electorate, at the sug- 
 gestion or dictation of not more than a dozen 
 men. Had such a system, or anything like it, 
 been proposed at the time the Constitution was 
 adopted, there would have been instant rebel- 
 lion. " Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- 
 ness" would not have seemed worth having 
 under such conditions. Yet, now that it has 
 come about, there is no very great dissatisfac- 
 tion with it. The system could be broken up 
 in a twelvemonth if men really cared to break 
 it up. It exists, therefore, by popular consent, 
 if not with popular approval. Its objective re~ 
 suits may be as good as those that would be
 
 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 115 
 
 reached by the ideal system ; but its effect on 
 the individual is disastrous. It induces a feel- 
 ing of irresponsibility for public policy and a 
 lack of interest in it that are absolutely de- 
 structive of good citizenship. The good citi- 
 zen is not the querulous critic of public men 
 and public affairs, however intelligent he may 
 be ; he is rather the constant participator in 
 political struggles, who has well-grounded con- 
 victions and a strong determination to influ- 
 ence, by all honorable means, the opinion of 
 the community. Were it otherwise, universal 
 suffrage would not be worth having, and public 
 education would be a luxury, not a necessity. 
 
 We do not better ourselves or serve the pub- 
 lic interest by berating those who do interest 
 themselves continually in politics, when their 
 aims and their methods are not to our liking. 
 There can be no doubt that the patriotic and 
 well-intentioned element in the community is 
 stronger and more numerous than the self- 
 seeking and evil-dispositioned. It has the 
 remedy in its own hands, and it is one of the 
 chief duties of our education to enforce this 
 truth.
 
 116 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 
 
 Much of the disinclination to engage in 
 active political life that is noticeable among a 
 portion of our people is due, I believe, to the 
 evil effects upon political standards and 
 methods that flow from the debasing and 
 degrading system that has gained so strong a 
 hold in the United States of treating public 
 office as a reward for partisan activity. The 
 spoils system is absolutely undemocratic and 
 utterly unworthy of toleration by an intelli- 
 gent people. Suppose that it ruled the schools, 
 as it rules so many other departments of public 
 administration : then we should expect to see 
 the election of a mayor in Boston, Chicago, 
 New Orleans, or San Francisco, followed by 
 hundreds of changes among the public school 
 teachers, made solely for political reasons. 
 How long would the National Educational 
 Association permit that to go on without a 
 protest that would be heard and heeded from 
 Maine to Texas ? Yet why should teachers, as 
 good citizens, be more tolerant of such an abuse 
 in other departments of the government ? We 
 have all noted with gratification the progress 
 that is making toward the elimination of this
 
 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 117 
 
 evil. A determined band of men have kept 
 the issue before the public for nearly a genera- 
 tion, and now they have the satisfaction of see- 
 ing a great portion of the national service 
 wrested from the defiling hand of the spoils 
 hunter. In the state of New York the people 
 have put into their new constitution an em- 
 phatic declaration on the subject. The full 
 effect of this declaration, splendidly upheld 
 and broadly interpreted by the courts, is just 
 beginning to dawn upon the foes of a reformed 
 and efficient public service. From this ad- 
 vance of sound sentiment and honest policy 
 we may take every encouragement. But much 
 remains to be done. Public sentiment must be 
 first interested, then educated. Efficient pub- 
 lic service is a mark of civilization. To turn 
 over the care of great public undertakings to 
 the self-seeking camp-followers of some politi- 
 cal potentate, is barbaric. We teachers are the 
 first to insist that incompetent and untrained 
 persons shall not be allowed in the service of 
 the schools. Why, then, should we tolerate 
 the sight of a house-painter, instead of an 
 engineer, supervising the streets and roadways
 
 118 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 
 
 of a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, or 
 that of an illiterate hanger-on presiding over 
 the public works of a great metropolis? 
 These instances, drawn at random from recent 
 political history, are typical of conditions that 
 will be found widely diffused throughout our 
 public service. Those conditions exist because 
 of bad citizenship, low ideals of public service, 
 and wretchedly inadequate moral vision. They 
 will not be remedied until each one of us 
 assumes his share of the task. 
 
 It is instructive, too, to note that the spoils 
 system has diverted public interest in great 
 measure from choice between policies to a 
 choice between men. Two hundred years 
 ago men made great sacrifices for an oppor- 
 tunity to share in the making of the laws 
 by which they were governed. Yet when, in 
 1894, the people of the state of New York 
 were called upon to vote, at one and the 
 same election, for a governor and for or 
 against a new constitution; containing many 
 important and some novel propositions, more 
 than a million and a quarter men voted for 
 a candidate for governor, while less than
 
 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 119 
 
 three-quarters of a million expressed them- 
 selves regarding the proposed constitution. 
 And this is by no means a solitary instance 
 of the tendency that it illustrates. A rational 
 and intelligent democracy will first discuss 
 questions of principle and then select agents 
 to carry their determinations into effect. To 
 fix our interest solely on individuals, and to 
 overlook or neglect the principles for which 
 they stand, is not intelligent. 
 
 It is a serious error, too, to believe, and 
 to spread the belief, that democracies have 
 nothing to learn as to principles of govern- 
 ment and nothing to improve. From the 
 time of Aristotle the dangers that are in- 
 herent in democracy have been known and 
 discussed. But in our time men are often 
 too blinded by the brilliancy of the mani- 
 fest successes and advantages of this form 
 of government to be able or willing to con- 
 sider carefully the other side of the picture. 
 How long, for example, could the American 
 Congress maintain its power and prestige, 
 if its membership was split up into half a 
 score of warring groups, as in France? How
 
 120 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 
 
 long will the American Senate continue to 
 call forth the respect and confidence of the 
 people, if its childish methods of transacting 
 public business and its inability to close its 
 own debates are allowed to continue? How 
 long would life in our greatest city be en- 
 durable, if its administration be turned over 
 permanently to the ignorant and rapacious 
 members of a society organized for political 
 plunder? What more distressing division 
 of our people can there be than one on sec- 
 tional lines, such as took place in 1860 and 
 such as is being attempted again in 1896? 
 Is it possible to believe that our native op- 
 timism is all that is needed to extricate us 
 from these dangers dangers not imaginary, 
 but terribly real ? 
 
 The difficulties of democracy are the op- 
 portunities of education. If our education 
 be sound, if it lay due emphasis on indi- 
 vidual responsibility for social and political 
 progress, if it counteract the anarchistic ten- 
 dencies that grow out of selfishness and 
 greed, if it promote a patriotism that reaches 
 farther than militant jingoism and gunboats,
 
 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 121 
 
 then we may cease to have any doubts as to 
 the perpetuity and integrity of our institu- 
 tions. But I am profoundly convinced that 
 the greatest educational need of our time, 
 in higher and lower schools alike, is a fuller 
 appreciation on the part of the teachers of 
 what human institutions really mean and 
 what tremendous moral issues and principles 
 they involve. The ethics of individual life 
 must be traced to its roots in the ethics of 
 the social whole. The family, property, the 
 common law, the state, and the church, are 
 all involved. These, and their products, 
 taken together, constitute civilization and 
 mark it off from barbarism. Inheritor of 
 a glorious past, each generation is a trustee 
 for posterity. To preserve, protect, and 
 transmit its inheritance unimpaired, is its 
 highest duty. To accomplish this is not 
 the task of the few, but the duty of all. 
 
 That democracy alone will be triumphant 
 which has both intelligence and character. 
 To develop them among the whole people 
 is the task of education in a democracy. 
 Not, then, by vainglorious boasting, not by
 
 122 DEMOCKACY AND EDUCATION 
 
 self-satisfied indifference, not by selfish and 
 indolent withdrawal from participation in 
 the interests and government of the commu- 
 nity, but rather by the enthusiasm, born of 
 intense conviction, that finds the happiness 
 of each in the good of all, will our educa- 
 tional ideals be satisfied and our free gov- 
 ernment be placed beyond the reach of the 
 forces of dissolution and decay.
 
 THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND THE 
 AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
 
 An Introduction 
 to Paulsen's "German Universities, 
 their character and historical development 
 (New York, 1895)
 
 THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND THE 
 AMERICAN UNIVERSITY 
 
 Nowhere, outside of the German-speaking 
 countries themselves, have the German uni- 
 versities been so highly appreciated and so 
 widely imitated as in the United States. Just 
 as the historic American college traces its ori- 
 gin in direct line to Oxford and Cambridge 
 and their influence, so the new American uni- 
 versity represents, to a remarkable degree, the 
 influence and authority of the academic tradi- 
 tions of Heidelberg and Gottingen, of Leipsic 
 and Berlin. 
 
 The distinction between the function of the 
 college and that of the university, which be- 
 comes clearer day by day to the student of 
 education, has thus far proved too subtle to 
 reach the understanding and too commonplace 
 to satisfy the pride of the American people ; 
 for the existing terminology inextricably con- 
 125
 
 126 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 
 
 fuses colleges and universities, and sometimes 
 even institutions that are little more than sec- 
 ondary schools, and it taxes the patience and 
 skill of the expert to disentangle them. If 
 we cut the Gordian knot by allowing every 
 institution founded for any form or phase of 
 higher education to classify itself by the name 
 that it assumes, then there are no fewer than 
 134 universities in the United States. 1 Of 
 these, 7 are in Illinois (although the new Uni- 
 versity of Chicago was not included in the 
 enumeration of 1890-91), 8 are in Kansas, 14 
 are in Ohio, 9 are in Tennessee (of which total 
 the city of Nashville alone, with about 80,000 
 inhabitants, contributes 3), 8 are in Texas, and 
 4 are in the city of New Orleans. When this 
 surprising number is compared with the total 
 of 20 universities for the whole German Em- 
 pire, it is evident, without further investiga- 
 tion, that there is some difference in standard 
 between the two countries, and that to be a 
 university in fact is something more than to 
 be a university in name. 
 
 1 Beport of the Commissioner of Education, 1890-91, pp. 
 1398-1413.
 
 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 127 
 
 According to another extreme view, there 
 are no American universities whatever. Only 
 two years ago so distinguished an authority 
 as Professor von Hoist, formerly of Freiburg 
 but now attached to the University of Chicago, 
 said: 2 
 
 " There is in the United States as yet not a 
 single university in the sense attached to the 
 word by Europeans. All the American insti- 
 tutions bearing this name are either compounds 
 of college and university the university, as 
 an aftergrowth, figuring still to some extent 
 as a kind of annex or excrescence of the col- 
 lege or hybrids of college and university, 
 or, finally, a torso of a university. An insti- 
 tution wholly detached from the school work 
 done by colleges, and containing all the four 
 faculties organically connected to a Universitas 
 literarum, does not exist." 
 
 Inasmuch as there is no common agreement 
 among Europeans as to what the term "uni- 
 versity" means as may readily be seen by 
 contrasting the University of Oxford with the 
 University of France, and either or both with 
 1 Educational Review, V, 113.
 
 128 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 
 
 the University of Berlin Professor von Hoist 
 obviously meant by European, German; and 
 his definition of a university bears out this 
 interpretation. With this limitation his judg- 
 ment may be accepted as technically correct ; 
 but it rests upon two false assumptions : 
 (1) that exact reproductions of the German 
 universities should be developed in the United 
 States, and that until this development takes 
 place there will be no American universities; 
 and (2) that the American college is to be 
 classed with the German gymnasium as a sec- 
 ondary school. Into these two blunders those 
 observers of American educational organization 
 who occupy the exclusively German point of 
 view habitually fall ; and in more than one 
 instance the truest and most natural develop- 
 ment of higher education in America has been 
 impeded and retarded by the attempt, on the 
 part of those who share Professor von Hoist's 
 errors, to force that development into the ex- 
 act channels worn by German precedent. 
 
 The American university may, or rather 
 must, learn the lessons that its German prede- 
 cessor has to teach, but it should be expected
 
 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 129 
 
 to develop also characteristics peculiar to it- 
 self. In order to become great indeed, in 
 order to exist at all, a university must rep- 
 resent the national life and minister to it. 
 When the universities of any country cease 
 to be in close touch with the social life and 
 institutions of the people, and fail to yield 
 to the efforts of those who would readjust 
 them, their days of influence are numbered. 
 The same is true of any system of educational 
 organization. For this reason alone, if for 
 no other, an educational organization closely 
 following the German type would not thrive 
 in America ; indeed, with all its undisputed 
 excellences, the German system would not 
 meet our needs so well as the yet unsyste- 
 matic, but remarkably effective, organization 
 that circumstances have brought into exis- 
 tence. Therefore Professor von Hoist is not 
 likely at any time to see a single university 
 in the United States, if he persists in giving 
 to that word its technical German significance. 
 But using the word in a broader, and, I be- 
 lieve, a truer sense, the sense that, while 
 not confounding it with a college, however
 
 130 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 
 
 large or however ancient, nor applying it 
 mistakenly to a college and a surrounding 
 group of technical and professional faculties 
 or schools, yet extends the term to include 
 any institution where students, adequately 
 trained by previous study of the liberal arts 
 and sciences, are led into special fields of 
 learning and research by teachers of high ex- 
 cellence and originality; and where, by the 
 agency of libraries, museums, laboratories, and 
 publications, knowledge is conserved, advanced, 
 and disseminated, in this sense one may per- 
 haps count six or eight American universities 
 in existence to-day, and half as many more 
 in the process of making. 
 
 To confuse the American college with the 
 German gymnasium is inexcusable. Neither 
 a large college like Princeton, nor a smaller 
 one like Williams or Bowdoin, can be imag- 
 ined as part of the gymnasial system. The 
 American college is, in the phrase of Tacitus, 
 tantum sui similis ; neither the English pub- 
 lic school, the French lycee, nor the German 
 gymnasium, is its counterpart. Its free stu- 
 dent-life and broad range of studies liken it
 
 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 131 
 
 in some degree to a university ; but the imma- 
 turity of its students, the necessarily didactic 
 character of most of the work of its instruc- 
 tors, and the end that it has in view, mark 
 it off as belonging to a different type. The 
 college has proved to be well suited to the 
 demands of American life and to be a power- 
 ful force in American civilization and culture. 
 Its usefulness is in no wise impaired nor its 
 dignity lessened now that the university, with 
 a wholly different aim and a totally different 
 set of problems to solve, has grown up by its 
 side. As President Hyde, of Bowdoin Col- 
 lege, has truly and forcibly said : l " For com- 
 bining sound scholarship with solid character ; 
 for making men both intellectually and spirit- 
 ually free ; for uniting the pursuit of truth 
 with reverence for duty, the small college 
 [and the large as well], open to the worthy 
 graduates of every good high school, present- 
 ing a course sufficiently rigid to give sym- 
 metrical development and sufficiently elastic to 
 encourage individuality along congenial lines, 
 taught by professors who are men first and 
 1 Educational Review, II, 320, 321.
 
 132 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 
 
 scholars afterwards, governed by kindly per- 
 sonal influence and secluded from too fre- 
 quent contact with social distractions, has a 
 mission which no change of educational con- 
 ditions can take away, and a policy which 
 no sentiment of vanity or jealousy should be 
 permitted to turn aside." 
 
 In 1891 there was one student enrolled in 
 a college of the liberal arts and sciences for 
 every 1363 inhabitants of the United States. 1 
 Counting five persons to a family, 2 this means 
 that one family in every 272.6, the country 
 over, contributed to the college population. 
 Of course, in some sections of the country 
 the ratio was much less. In Massachusetts, 
 for example, there was one college student 
 for every 858 of population, or one for every 
 171.6 families. In Iowa the proportion was 
 one to 908 persons, or 181.6 families ; in 
 Utah, one to 789 persons, or 157.8 families. 
 These statistics, read in relation to the vast 
 
 1 Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1890-91, 
 p. 827. 
 
 2 The actual ratio in the United States in 1890 was 4.93 
 (see Abstract of the Eleventh Census, 1890, p. 64).
 
 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 138 
 
 extent of the territory of the United States 
 and to the heterogeneousness of its popula- 
 tion of 70,000,000, are ample proof, if proof 
 were needed, that the college is a very famil- 
 iar feature in American life, and that it sup- 
 plies the educational needs of the people to 
 a remarkable degree. 
 
 Of the 481 American colleges, perhaps no 
 two have precisely the same course of study 
 or the same equipment ; but the common 
 features that distinguish them are well known. 
 The ancient classics, mathematics, the English 
 language and literature, the modern European 
 languages, the natural sciences, economics and 
 philosophy, are doubtless represented to some 
 extent in every college curriculum ; yet every 
 phase of educational opinion and every variety 
 of local interest are represented in the details 
 of their arrangement. But we may be sure 
 that wherever it is found, whether on the 
 Atlantic seaboard, in some inland town of 
 the West or South, or on the Pacific slope, 
 the college is a force making for a broader 
 intellectual life and a higher type of citizen- 
 ship. It leaves to the university the task of
 
 134 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 
 
 educating specialists, investigators, and sci- 
 entifically trained members of the learned 
 professions. 
 
 The diversity of the college when contrasted 
 with the uniformity of the gymnasium makes 
 it plain that the American university does 
 not rest upon any uniform and closely con- 
 trolled foundation. American students come 
 to the university with very varied prepara- 
 tion in knowledge and training. But if the 
 healthy forces recently set at work in the 
 field of American higher education bring 
 about their legitimate results, the efficiency 
 of the university and its power for good 
 will be distinctly increased rather than dimin- 
 ished by the fact that its students are not all 
 cast in a common mould. The principles of 
 the limited election of studies and of the 
 adaptation of the curriculum to the pupil, 
 rather than the pupil to the curriculum, are 
 as sound when applied in the secondary school 
 as in the college, and the scope of their appli- 
 cation widens year by year. The American 
 college graduate who desires a university 
 career is thus enabled to enter upon it a
 
 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 135 
 
 broadly and liberally educated man, with 
 tastes formed and aptitudes developed, ready 
 to undertake with immediate advantage the 
 specialized work for the sake of which the 
 university exists. He is much more widely, 
 though perhaps less minutely, trained, than 
 the German Abiturient. 
 
 In one very important respect the American 
 system of higher education is distinctly supe- 
 rior to the German. In Germany a clear-cut 
 dividing line between the gymnasium and the 
 university is drawn by the complete and care- 
 fully preserved difference in method, in spirit, 
 and in ideal that exists between them. The 
 contrast between the narrowness of the gym- 
 nasium and the generous freedom of the univer- 
 sity is very sharp, and many a university student 
 loses his balance entirely, or wastes much pre- 
 cious time and force, in adjusting himself to his 
 totally new surroundings. In America, on the 
 contrary, the college and the university some- 
 times exist side by side in the same corpora- 
 tion, as at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, 
 and Chicago, and the work of the one passes 
 gradually and insensibly into that of the other.
 
 136 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 
 
 Even when, as is generally the case, the col- 
 lege exists as a thing apart, the later years of 
 its course of study are so organized and con- 
 ducted as to make the transition from college 
 to university easy and natural. This practice 
 is sound in psychology, sound in economics, 
 and sound in common sense. Its practical suc- 
 cess is amply demonstrated by the fact that 
 there is no American university unless that 
 name be given to the few partially developed 
 departments of study represented at Worcester, 
 Mass., that is not in the closest relation to a 
 college which is a member of the same corpora- 
 tion. The institutions that to Professor von 
 Hoist are "compounds of college and univer- 
 sity " are, therefore, not, -as he evidently thinks, 
 compounds of gymnasium and university, but 
 the peculiar product of the American educa- 
 tional organization and its peculiar strength. 
 
 But though the foundation on which uni- 
 versity work in America rests, differs and will 
 continue to differ from that provided in Ger- 
 many by a uniform system of state-controlled 
 gymnasiums, the university itself is essentially 
 the same ; indeed, its organization has been
 
 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 137 
 
 effected largely by men who had studied in 
 the German universities, and who desired to 
 develop in the United States a similar vehicle 
 for the highest form of the scientific activity 
 of the nation. The three fundamental princi- 
 ples that the German universities have estab- 
 lished and brilliantly illustrated, Lehrfreiheit, 
 Lernfreiheit, and the pursuit of science for its 
 own sake, are fully recognized in the American 
 universities ; although it cannot be said that 
 the third principle is as -fully lived up to as 
 it ought to be. Professor Paulsen has himself 
 pointed out in his latest publication on the 
 subject 1 that the peculiar character of the Ger- 
 man university lies in the fact that it closely 
 connects research and teaching. At present 
 complaint is made that the one aim, research, 
 is too largely pursued at the expense of the 
 other, with the undoubted result, as a German 
 university professor admits, 2 that, considered 
 merely as teaching institutions, the American 
 universities surpass the German in efficiency. 
 
 1 Deutsche Rundschau, September, 1894. 
 8 Professor Hugo Munsterberg, quoted in Educational 
 Review, VII, 204.
 
 138 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 
 
 The emphasis often laid on teaching, at the 
 expense of research, in the American universi- 
 ties is largely due to the fact that the older 
 generation of American university professors 
 are men who were for many years engaged in 
 the work of purely collegiate teaching, and 
 they have neither outgrown nor cast off the 
 habits and methods of years, nor combined re- 
 search with teaching in any marked degree. 
 This, of course, is quite as much to be depre- 
 cated as an exaggeration of the opposite ten- 
 dency. The younger generation of university 
 teachers, however, a large proportion of whom 
 have been trained in Germany, combine re- 
 search with teaching in almost every instance ; 
 though, happily, research is not yet reduced 
 to work with "the lens, electrode, test-tube, 
 and psychometer," which apparently seems to 
 Dr. G. Stanley Hall to cover the field of possi- 
 ble investigation. 1 It is possible, of course, in 
 the enthusiastic devotion to research to over- 
 look entirely or to minimize the need of good 
 teaching in universities, and also to exaggerate 
 
 1 See " Research the vital spirit of teaching," The 
 Forum, August, 1894.
 
 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 139 
 
 the influence of research in producing good 
 teachers ; but from present indications, this is 
 not a source of immediate danger in the United 
 States. Our wisest university teachers are in 
 agreement with Virchow, who said recently 1 
 that the aim of university study is " general 
 scientific and moral culture together with the 
 mastery of one special department of study." 
 The main obstacle to the full establishment 
 in America of the pursuit of science for its own 
 sake, as a controlling university principle, is 
 the development and rapid growth of technical 
 schools, with low standards of entrance, in con- 
 nection with universities, and their admission 
 to a full and even controlling share in univer- 
 sity legislation and administration. Indeed, in 
 this lies the chief danger to the integrity of 
 American university development. Thus far 
 the Johns Hopkins University has escaped 
 these influences entirely, and Harvard Univer- 
 sity has been able to hold them in check. But 
 at some other institutions they are strong and 
 menacing. The danger consists in allowing 
 the claim that closely specialized work in a 
 1 Lernen und Forschen (Berlin, 1892), p. 8. ,
 
 140 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 
 
 purely technical or professional branch, entered 
 upon without any broad preparatory training 
 whatever, is to be regarded as legitimate uni- 
 versity work and entitled to the time-honored 
 university recognition and rewards. It need 
 hardly be pointed out to the intelligent reader 
 that the tendency to do this is under full head- 
 way in the United States, and that its essential 
 narrowness and philistinism increase with its 
 success in establishing itself. The general 
 public attribute unmerited scientific impor- 
 tance to technical schools established in con- 
 nection with colleges and universities because 
 of their large enrollment ; and governing boards 
 look upon them with favor both because of the 
 influence they exert through their graduates 
 and because they are often important sources 
 of revenue. Both facts tend to divert atten- 
 tion and funds from the pursuit of science as 
 an end in itself, and to keep that principle 
 from controlling university policy as it should. 
 The difficulty would be diminished, and per- 
 haps removed, if these technical schools (law, 
 medicine, technology, and the like) were put 
 upon a true university basis by insisting upon
 
 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 141 
 
 a liberal education as a prerequisite for admis- 
 sion to them. This would bring about a con- 
 dition analogous to that which prevails in 
 Germany, and would raise the American uni- 
 versities to a plane that they have never yet 
 occupied. For, with the exception of the 
 medical school at the Johns Hopkins Univer- 
 sity and the law school at Harvard, there are 
 no professional schools in America of univer- 
 sity rank. The others, without exception, admit 
 to their courses and degrees immature students 
 who have had only a partial secondary school 
 training, or often no training at all. When 
 such a state of affairs exists within a university 
 organization, it is apparent that the technical 
 or professional schools are an injury rather 
 than a legitimate source of pride and strength, 
 no matter how many hundreds of students they 
 may attract. Indeed, the larger they become 
 the greater is their influence for evil, for their 
 teaching is necessarily brought down to the 
 level of the least-trained intelligences among 
 the heterogeneous body of students, and in this 
 way the standard of the whole university is 
 lowered.
 
 142 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 
 
 So far as this tendency exists in the case of 
 schools of applied science, it must be confessed 
 that its existence is largely due to the attitude 
 of the partisans of the old-fashioned uniform 
 college course. By refusing to mathematical 
 and scientific studies an equal place by the 
 side of Greek and Latin, they forced the 
 schools of science to establish themselves 
 in many cases on the narrowest possible edu- 
 cational basis outside of the college and in 
 competition with it ; when, with a broad and 
 generous treatment of the problems involved, 
 the scientific or technical course might have 
 been grafted on the college in a way that 
 would have been of inestimable value both to 
 the technical school and to the college, and 
 greatly to the advantage of the cause of lib- 
 eral education. The time when this could 
 have been accomplished easily is past; but it 
 can yet be brought about if undertaken in the 
 right spirit and with wisdom. 
 
 It is seemingly impossible for universities 
 generally to raise their schools of law and 
 medicine to university rank in the face of 
 public indifference as to the educational quali-
 
 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 143 
 
 fications of lawyers and physicians. How 
 long this indifference will continue unmoved, 
 there are no means of determining. Here and 
 there efforts are making to insist upon some 
 portion, at least, of a secondary education as a 
 qualification for admission to schools of law 
 and medicine. But as a rule admission to the 
 practice of those professions is open to any 
 one, however ignorant, who will serve a short 
 term of apprenticeship. This arrangement is 
 sometimes defended on the ground that many 
 men have in the past greatly distinguished 
 themselves as lawyers or physicians, though 
 without any liberal education whatever. This 
 is true, but they were rare exceptions; and 
 they become rarer each year as competition 
 grows closer and more pressing. So far as 
 law, at least, is concerned, one reason for the 
 prevailing laxity may be found in the fact 
 that this profession offers the easiest mode of 
 entrance into politics ; and to engage in that 
 field of activity is often a chief aim in the 
 minds of maDy young men who have no desire 
 for a liberal education. But whatever public 
 opinion may rest satisfied with, it seems indis-
 
 144 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 
 
 putable that universities owe it to themselves 
 to put their stamp upon no graduates in law, 
 medicine and technology who are not liberally- 
 educated men. 
 
 When the technical and professional schools 
 shall have been raised to true university rank, 
 one series of problems will be solved ; but 
 others will remain. It is as necessary in 
 America as Paulsen describes it to be in Ger- 
 many, to conserve the unity of the university 
 about the historic faculty of philosophy as a 
 centre. This faculty is at once the essence 
 of a university and its true glory. Standing 
 alone it may justify the title university, as 
 the history of the Johns Hopkins University 
 for twenty years amply demonstrates. But to 
 make it subordinate or to keep it weak and 
 unimportant, whether by subdivision or other 
 means, is to sap the university's life-blood. 
 The faculty of philosophy represents, when un- 
 divided, the unity of knowledge and the true 
 catholicity of scholarly investigation. Through 
 it each department of study is kept in sympa- 
 thy with its fellows, and each strengthens and 
 supports the rest. When dissevered, its parts
 
 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 145 
 
 tend to become mere Fachschulen ; and the 
 highest ideals of university life are sacrificed. 
 No stronger evidence in support of this opin- 
 ion can be cited than the emphatic statements 
 on the subject made by du Bois-Reymond, 
 the physiologist, and by Hofmann, the chemist, 
 in their inaugural addresses on assuming the 
 rectorship of the University of Berlin in 1869 
 and 1880, respectively. These are the words 
 of du Bois-Reymond : " The philosophical fac- 
 ulty forms the connecting link between the 
 remaining faculties. . . . The reciprocal ac- 
 tion of the different branches of human knowl- 
 edge which takes place within the philosophical 
 faculty, would naturally be lost with its divi- 
 sion, but this mutual influence contributes 
 very much to widen the vision of the individ- 
 ual, and to preserve in him a right judgment 
 of his position in relation to the whole. The 
 two divisions of the faculty would finally ap- 
 proach the character of special schools ; the 
 ideal stamp of the whole would be destroyed." 1 
 And eleven years later Hofmann defended the 
 same position with equal vigor. 
 
 1 Ueber Universitats-Einrichtungen (Berlin, 1869), p. 1& 
 i.
 
 146 COLLEGE AND UNIVEKSITY 
 
 The faculty of philosophy, or of arts and 
 sciences, must not only be preserved in its 
 integrity, but its spirit must dominate the 
 whole university. As has recently been offi- 
 cially pointed out, 1 " The safety of the uni- 
 versity spirit demands that the university 
 proper [the faculty of philosophy] be counted 
 as one part, and the collected schools [tech- 
 nical and professional] together as another 
 rather than that each professional and technical 
 faculty shall claim a coordinate right with 
 the foundation faculty, which would thus be 
 made, not a half, but a seventh (or possibly 
 one-twentieth, as the schools multiplied) of 
 the university which but for it could have no 
 real existence." This is still another lesson 
 that the administrators of American univer- 
 sities have yet to learn. 
 
 One other danger, common to all universities, 
 whether German or American, lies in the ex- 
 cessive specialization which is so often warmly 
 recommended to university students. Its inev- 
 itable result is loss of ability to see things in 
 
 1 See Beport of the Secretary of the University of the state 
 of New York for 1893, p. 176.
 
 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 147 
 
 their proper proportions, as well as loss of 
 sympathy with learning as a whole. Perhaps 
 the division of labor cannot be carried too far 
 for the value of the product, but certainly it 
 can be carried too far for the good of the 
 laborer. 
 
 " Denn nur der grosse Gegenstand vermag 
 Den tiefen Grand der Menschheit aufzuregen, 
 Im engen Kreis verengert sich der Sinn." 
 
 Signs are not wanting that this narrowing of 
 view and of sympathy is already taking place ; 
 but the university has in the faculty of phi- 
 losophy the means to correct it if it will. 
 What science and practical life alike need is 
 not narrow men, but broad men sharpened to 
 a point. To train such is the highest func- 
 tion of the American university ; and by its 
 success in producing them must its efficiency 
 be finally judged.
 
 THE FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY 
 SCHOOL
 
 An Address 
 
 delivered before the 
 
 Schoolmasters' Association of New York and vicinity, 
 
 March 8, 1890
 
 THE FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY 
 SCHOOL 
 
 Matthew Arnold has reminded us that 
 the secondary school is the most ancient 
 of existing educational institutions. It ante- 
 dates the university by several centuries; and 
 by its side the primary or elementary school, 
 springing as it does from needs and ideas that 
 are comparatively modern, seems but a creature 
 of yesterday. Moreover, the history of the sec- 
 ondary school is unbroken and easily traceable. 
 The monastery schools and the famous estab- 
 lishments at St. Gall, Reichenau, and Fulda are 
 the direct ancestors of our Etons and Rugbys, 
 of our contemporary lycees, gymnasia, and 
 academies. 
 
 In the United States the educational organi- 
 zation is so indefinite and unformed, and the 
 educational terminology in common use so un- 
 151
 
 152 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 systematic, that certain explanations are neces- 
 sary before any discussion of the province and 
 scope of the secondary school may be under- 
 taken. The threefold division of instruction 
 into primary or elementary, secondary, and su- 
 perior, has been accepted by the Bureau of 
 Education at Washington, and is in accord 
 with the practice on the continent of Europe. 
 By superior instruction is meant that given in 
 institutions empowered by law to confer de- 
 grees. This may be either general or special, 
 and includes in this country the colleges and 
 universities as well as the professional schools 
 of law, medicine, theology, education, agricult- 
 ure, pharmacy, engineering, and the like. The 
 implication is, though unfortunately not always 
 the fact, that these institutions for superior 
 instruction have required of applicants for 
 admission the possession of an approved sec- 
 ondary education. By primary or elementary 
 instruction is meant such as the state is justi- 
 fied in requiring of all children for its own 
 safety and perpetuity. In the present state 
 of educational science this may safely be held 
 to include a knowledge of reading and writing,
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 153 
 
 and some instruction in elementary arithmetic, 
 geography, history, natural science, and manual 
 training. This elementary education should 
 begin not later than the sixth year of life and 
 with the average child seven years may be 
 devoted to it, although specially intelligent 
 or studious children may be permitted, as in 
 France, to complete the prescribed studies in 
 less time. 
 
 It would seem natural, then, that the field 
 of secondary instruction should be that which 
 lies between the elementary and the superior 
 schools. But this is not quite true. There 
 is and can be no sharp line of division between 
 the various grades of instruction. They pass 
 gradually, even insensibly, into each other. In 
 order to prevent the pupil's development from 
 being arrested and his capacity for education 
 from being brought to an end, he must con- 
 stantly be led on to new heights. For this 
 reason certain studies, usually classed as be- 
 longing to secondary education, such as algebra 
 and a foreign language, are very appropriately 
 taught in the upper grades of the elementary 
 school. A beginning in the field of secondary
 
 154 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 studies is therefore made before the limits of 
 the elementary school are reached, and by 
 the time that the pupil is twelve, eleven, or 
 even ten years of age. This is actually the 
 case with the French lycee and the Prussian 
 gymnasium. 
 
 At the upper end of the secondary school 
 course a similar condition is found. There is 
 no reason why many secondary schools, partic- 
 ularly public high schools, over 60 per cent, of 
 whose graduates do not go on to a higher edu- 
 cational institution, should not give instruc- 
 tion in subjects such as logic, political economy, 
 and trigonometry, which are contained in every 
 college course. Unless this policy is adopted, 
 the vast majority of American boys and girls 
 will be deprived of all opportunity to come 
 in contact with these studies and others like 
 them. 
 
 In the past the secondary school in this 
 country has been very often dwarfed in im- 
 portance and deprived of its proper spontane- 
 ity and individuality, because it has permitted 
 itself to settle down to the routine task of 
 preparing pupils for entrance examination to
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 155 
 
 college, fixed and conducted by the college 
 authorities. Whatever that entrance exami- 
 nation demanded, and in some cases just a 
 trifle more, has been taught ; whatever such 
 examination did not call for, no matter how 
 important or valuable it might be for a boy's 
 education, has not been taught. The second- 
 ary school has been too largely dominated by 
 the college ; and in few cases has that domina- 
 tion been other than unfortunate. As notable 
 instances of the contrary effect may be men- 
 tioned the stimulating influence of the more 
 recent regulations regarding entrance examina- 
 tions adopted by Harvard College, particularly 
 in geometry and in physics, and the novel 
 unity and thoroughness imparted to the in- 
 struction in English in the secondary schools 
 by the action of the colleges in uniting with 
 the schools in deciding upon a uniform 
 scheme of requirements for entrance in that 
 subject. 
 
 It is neither proper nor dignified for the 
 secondary schools to continue in this con- 
 dition of dependence upon college entrance 
 examinations. They should be independent
 
 156 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 and self-centred. By a careful study of the 
 history and principles of education, coupled 
 with the teachings of their own large experi- 
 ence, they should seek to devise that course 
 of study and those methods of instruction 
 that are best suited to the mental, moral, and 
 physical development and culture of the boys 
 and girls committed to their care. Nor need 
 it be feared that in so doing they will in- 
 terfere in any way with the preparation of 
 their pupils for college work. For in educa- 
 tion it is profoundly true that that which is 
 intrinsically the best in any particular stage 
 of development, is also the best preparation 
 for that which comes after. 
 
 If the American boy is to obtain his bacca- 
 laureate degree at the age 6f twenty or 
 twenty-one (which is considerably more than 
 a year later than the French boys leave the 
 lycee and the Prussian boys the gymnasium), 
 he must be ready to enter college not later 
 than seventeen; and this can be managed 
 while actually providing for the secondary 
 school a more comprehensive curriculum than 
 at present obtains. Before discussing in de-
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 157 
 
 tail the composition of such a curriculum, 
 one or two preliminary considerations must 
 be mentioned. They may, however, be dis- 
 missed very briefly, since they have so re- 
 cently been treated with the highest authority 
 by President Eliot. 1 The first of these has 
 to do with the length of the school day and 
 that of the vacations. The former should 
 never be less than five full hours of study 
 and school discipline ; the tendency to shorten 
 it any further is irrational and should be 
 checked. A programme arranged on sound 
 educational principles can occupy five hours 
 a day easily enough without in any way im- 
 pairing the pupil's health or lessening his 
 interest, unless the teacher is peculiarly lack- 
 ing in mental equipment and professional 
 qualifications. The vacations are now unduly 
 long, and seem to be yielding to a certain 
 strong social pressure to make them even 
 longer. The old-fashioned summer vacation 
 of four or six weeks has long since become 
 one of ten or twelve, and in our city schools 
 
 1 Can school programmes be shortened and enriched ? 
 Atlantic Monthly, August, 1888, pp. 260-268.
 
 158 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 a summer vacation of fifteen or even sixteen 
 weeks is by no means a curiosity. It is the 
 teacher who needs this vacation more than 
 the pupil. But even from his standpoint the 
 present practice has gone beyond reasonable 
 bounds. The German method of giving three 
 weeks at Easter, one at Pfingster, six in mid- 
 summer, one at Michaelmas, and two at Christ- 
 mas seems wiser than ours, for it makes a 
 more frequent alternation between work and 
 play. Perhaps sixteen weeks including the 
 recesses at Christmas and Easter and a long 
 summer vacation, as better suited to our cli- 
 mate and habits of life than the German plan 
 might be agreed upon as the maximum 
 period in which school duties may wisely be 
 suspended each year. 
 
 But in addition to the school year of thirty- 
 six weeks and twenty-five hours in each week, 
 the secondary schools are sadly in need of 
 better trained teachers. It is remarkable how 
 entirely the teachers in these schools have re- 
 mained uninfluenced by the great interest in 
 the science and art of teaching which has 
 of late years manifested itself both in this
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 159 
 
 country and in Europe. Secure in their pos- 
 session of a considerable amount of knowledge 
 and of more or less culture, the secondary 
 school teachers have not seemed to under- 
 stand the significance or the value of a pro- 
 fessional preparation. As a result their work 
 has been done in a routine, imitative way and 
 their pupils have suffered. Most of the criti- 
 cisms that may now be legitimately made 
 upon the work of the secondary schools would 
 be disarmed if the teachers in these schools 
 were abreast of the present development of 
 their art. One important reason why the sec- 
 ondary schools have not felt this full measure 
 of progress in methods of teaching that is so 
 marked in the elementary schools, is that sec- 
 ondary teachers are usually college graduates, 
 and the colleges have, until very recently, 
 done so little to show that they are aware 
 of what is being accomplished in the study of 
 education. Consequently they have failed to 
 contribute their proper proportion of duly 
 qualified teachers. Until the colleges assume 
 their full responsibility in this matter and en- 
 deavor to discharge it, the work of the sec-
 
 160 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 ondary school, speaking broadly, will not be 
 as well done as it might be. 
 
 Assuming that more competent teachers are 
 at hand and that a school year of thirty-six 
 weeks of twenty-five hours each is agreed 
 upon, what should be the aim of the instruc- 
 tion in the secondary school and with what 
 curriculum should it endeavor to accomplish 
 it? It should be the aim of the secondary 
 school, I take it, by instruction and discipline 
 to lay the foundation for that cultivation and 
 inspiration that mark the truly educated man. 
 In endeavoring to attain this ideal, the second- 
 ary school must not lose sight of the fact 
 that it is educating boys who are to assume 
 the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, 
 and who must, in all probability, pursue a 
 specific calling for the purpose of gaining a 
 livelihood. The fact that the secondary school 
 has also a selective function to perform is 
 often overlooked. Yet this is most important. 
 Secondary school pupils are adolescents, and 
 their tastes and capacities are rapidly forming 
 and finding expression. To afford opportunity 
 for these to develop, and to encourage them to
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 161 
 
 develop along the best and most effective lines, 
 is an obvious duty of the secondary school. 
 Because they are not selective, many secondary 
 courses of study are very ineffective. 
 
 To prepare a course of study which shall 
 keep all these points in mind, and at the same 
 time afford the developing intellect of the 
 pupil that exercise of which it is capable, is 
 not an easy task. Indeed, it presents some 
 problems which but a little while ago seemed 
 almost impossible of solution. But patience, 
 wider experience, and a careful study of the 
 surrounding conditions have lessened the dif- 
 ficulties. The chief of these is perhaps that 
 created by the rapid development and present 
 importance of scientific and technical schools. 
 These institutions represent a real and signifi- 
 cant movement in modern civilization. They 
 have complicated the question of a curriculum 
 for secondary schools by demanding a prepara- 
 tion quite different from that required for en- 
 trance to the average American college. That 
 the problem thus raised belongs to the field of 
 secondary education in general and is not due 
 to conditions prevailing in any one country
 
 162 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 alone, is shown by the fact that England, 
 Germany, and France have all been brought 
 face to face with it as we have been. In each 
 of these countries much progress towards its 
 solution has been made. In England the so- 
 called "modern side" has been added to the 
 traditional classical course. In France the 
 lycee has its cours spScial in which mathe- 
 matics and the sciences replace Latin and 
 Greek. In Germany the well-established real- 
 gymnasium and real-schule are every year 
 justifying their right to exist on an equal plane 
 with the gymnasium itself. A specially inter- 
 esting movement in this connection is one in 
 Germany which has for some time past been 
 calling for the establishment of an JSinheits- 
 schule, in which the main features both of 
 gymnasium and real-schule are to be combined. 
 The course of study that I would suggest 
 for the typical American secondary school 
 is one in which nine elements are always 
 represented : namely, the mother-tongue, ge- 
 ography and history, natural science, mathe- 
 matics, Latin, Greek, French and German, 
 drawing and constructive work (manual train-
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 163 
 
 ing), and physical training. It combines some 
 features of the English "modern side" with 
 some of those of the French cours spScial, 
 and is not unlike what German students of 
 education have in mind under the name of JSin- 
 heit88chule. It involves beginning the study 
 of one foreign language at ten or eleven 
 years of age, and the elements of algebra 
 and of plane geometry shortly afterward. 
 Ample choice would be permitted to students, 
 provided only that not more than five so-called 
 "book" subjects were carried on at once, that 
 no two new languages were begun at the same 
 time, and that English, geography and history, 
 and natural science were always represented. 
 Pupils of a different temperament, of different 
 points of view, and with different purposes in 
 life would be guided to express and to satisfy 
 themselves to the fullest extent possible. The 
 ability to read intelligently, to write legibly, 
 and to perform understandingly and correctly 
 with integers the four fundamental operations 
 of arithmetic, must be insisted upon at ten 
 years of age. 
 
 The growing practice of postponing even
 
 164 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 this modicum of knowledge until after the 
 tenth year is to be emphatically discouraged. 
 Attention has recently been called to the fact 
 that one of the best-known academies in the 
 United States requires for admission only some 
 knowledge of common school arithmetic, writ- 
 ing, spelling, and the elements of English 
 grammar, and that the average age of pupils 
 on entering is sixteen and one-half years. At 
 this age the French boy is reading Cicero, Vir- 
 gil, and Horace, Sophocles and Plato, Shakspere 
 and Tennyson, as well as studying general his- 
 tory, solid geometry, and chemistry. His Ger- 
 man contemporary is similarly advance^. It is 
 very evident that at this point there is a tremen- 
 dous waste in our educational system. It must 
 be remedied and remedied speedily, if our higher 
 education is not to be discredited altogether. 
 
 What I intend to include under each of the 
 topics of study above enumerated may be 
 briefly outlined. 
 
 1 English The study of the mother tongue 
 must not be neglected by any class of students. 
 But it must be far better taught than now and 
 with a different aim. That the instruction in
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 165 
 
 English, both in school and college, has been 
 sadly neglected and little developed in the past, 
 will not be denied. Perhaps no one but the col- 
 lege professor who requires original written work 
 from his pupils, knows how insufficient and in- 
 efficient the English teaching in the secondary- 
 school is. A very large proportion of those 
 students who reach the baccalaureate degree 
 do not possess the ability to express with 
 accuracy and conciseness, whether orally or in 
 writing, even a simple train of thought. This 
 woeful neglect of the mother tongue has been 
 largely due, as Paulsen points out is the case in 
 Germany, to the great preponderance of classi- 
 cal instruction and the impression that this 
 afforded all the linguistic training necessary. 
 We have gradually emancipated ourselves from 
 the tyranny of this notion ; and now the long- 
 neglected study of the mother tongue is begin- 
 ning to receive proper recognition in schools of 
 every grade. Our ideals for this study are no 
 longer satisfied by the plodding through a 
 grammar and by the memorizing of a few rules 
 and canons of rhetoric. Language study, and 
 particularly that of a tongue so rich, so versa-
 
 166 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 tile and so intrinsically interesting as our own, 
 means far more than that. 
 
 The general aim of this instruction in the 
 secondary school should be to impart a know- 
 ledge of the principal laws of structure and syn- 
 tax, to develop ease, fluency, and correctness in 
 speaking and writing, to point out the principal 
 stages in the history of English literature, and 
 to bring the pupil to an acquaintance with some 
 of the great masterpieces of prose and verse. 
 Wide but carefully chosen reading and frequent 
 and systematic exercises in composition are the 
 most efficient means of instruction. It should 
 be remarked, however, that composition writing 
 is valuable only if the pupil's work is care- 
 fully and intelligently corrected and criticised. 
 Otherwise it is a positive evil, for it serves to 
 exaggerate and make habitual faults already 
 present in the use of language. It is of the 
 highest importance that the pupil should be 
 accustomed to hear correct English spoken. 
 Downright inaccuracy of speech should be con- 
 sidered sufficient reason for a teacher's removal. 
 A boy will learn more evil in a week from 
 a bad example than he will derive good
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 167 
 
 from a book in a month. Most language in- 
 struction should be oral and the pupil should 
 from the very first take a large part in the ex- 
 ercises. As language is but the form and ex- 
 pression of thought, care should be taken to see 
 that thought is always expressed by it. This 
 cannot be the case if the pupil is forced ahead 
 either too rapidly or in an unnatural course. 
 The amount of time proposed for this branch of 
 study is therefore comparatively large, and no 
 class should be relieved of the necessity of 
 writing dictations-exercises or compositions at 
 least as often as once a week. When this is 
 done and done properly in the secondary school, 
 the college instruction in English may enter 
 upon that which really belongs to it, and will 
 no longer be compelled to devote itself, as 
 now, almost wholly to what President Charles 
 Kendall Adams once happily described as " the 
 flagellation of bad English." Nor should it 
 be forgotten that the secondary school must 
 bear its share in teaching pupils how and what 
 to read, in the best and deepest sense of that 
 phrase. No English instruction is entirely 
 successful unless it implants in every pupil
 
 168 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 a love of the masters of thought and style and 
 a desire to grow more and more familiar with 
 them. 
 
 2 Geography and History These comple- 
 mentary studies, inseparable from each other 
 and indispensable to a sound education, have 
 also been sadly neglected in the secondary 
 schools. We might truthfully say of the 
 Americans, as Breal said a few years ago of 
 his fellow Frenchmen, that they are celebrated 
 for their ignorance of geography. The subject 
 has been so badly taught that it might almost 
 as well have been passed over altogether. We 
 are now beginning to follow the example set 
 us by Germany in teaching geography, and 
 perhaps in a few years it will be adequately 
 presented in the schools. Geography has two 
 distinct aims. It seeks to point out and de- 
 scribe the character, the divisions, the climate, 
 and the configuration of the surface of the globe 
 that we inhabit, and also to trace the modifi- 
 cations which man himself has made and the 
 artificial divisions that he has marked off upon 
 it. When dealing with the former questions 
 geography is physical; when considering the
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 169 
 
 latter it is political and commercial. It thus 
 occupies a position between the natural and the 
 historical sciences and connects the two. 
 
 When geography is properly taught, the child 
 is first led to observe his immediate surround- 
 ings. The points of the compass, relative situa- 
 tions and distances, the real significance of a map, 
 may all be taught and best taught with reference 
 to the city, town, or village in which the partic- 
 ular school is situated. The schoolroom should 
 be well supplied with globes, relief maps, 
 charts, and other illustrative material, in order 
 that, when the pupil passes from the considera- 
 tion of his immediate surroundings to that of 
 localities at a distance, his understanding may 
 receive the assistance of these symbolic repre- 
 sentations. When political and commercial 
 geography is undertaken, its close relation with 
 history makes it both advisable and necessary 
 to teach both subjects together. Perhaps no 
 study that is pursued at this age brings to the 
 pupil a richer store of facts or a greater in- 
 tellectual stimulus than do these. Historical 
 teaching proper will of course begin with the 
 narration of the lives of great men and the
 
 170 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 story of their achievements. About this as a 
 nucleus may be grouped a considerable body of 
 facts and an account of the tendencies set in 
 operation by leaders of thought and action. 
 This mode of presentation familiarizes the 
 pupil from the first with the human factor, 
 the spiritual force, in history. The scope of 
 the historical teaching in an American second- 
 ary school should include an accurate know- 
 ledge of the main facts in the history of the 
 United States and of England, as well as a 
 general acquaintance with the progress of uni- 
 versal history. 
 
 3 Mathematics Whether or not Sir Wil- 
 liam Hamilton was justified in his unfavorable 
 judgment as to the value of mathematical 
 study, it seems clear that our schools have 
 devoted too much time to the subject. Un- 
 der the guise of mathematics much has been 
 taught that is not mathematics at all. Ab- 
 struse and very absurd problems and puzzles in 
 logic are to be found in almost every mathe- 
 matical text-book under the delusive head- 
 ing of "Examples." These simply vex and 
 discourage the student and arouse in him a
 
 
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 171 
 
 distaste for what is really valuable and prac- 
 tical in mathematical study. They should be 
 passed over entirely, as should also many of 
 the complexities of commercial arithmetic, and 
 all but three or four of the tables of weights 
 and measures. The metric system must be 
 taught as a matter of course. The elements 
 of plane geometry should precede algebra for 
 every reason known to sound educational 
 theory. It is more fundamental, it is more 
 concrete, and it deals with things and their 
 relations rather than with symbols. In the 
 form of what the Germans call Raumlehre, 
 many geometrical facts would be taught from 
 the first, in the proposed curriculum, under 
 the head of drawing and constructive work. 
 When the formal proofs of geometry are later 
 entered upon, they will therefore be seen to 
 be easy and natural, rather than difficult and 
 wholly strange. Good teaching in mathe- 
 matics should enable the student who follows 
 a classical course during the last three years 
 in the secondary school, to enter college with 
 a good understanding of arithmetic, algebra 
 and geometry, both plane and solid. The
 
 172 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 student selecting a scientific course in the 
 secondary school could add to this a know- 
 ledge of analytic geometry, of trigonometry, 
 and perhaps of determinants as well. 
 
 4 Natural Science This is a term of wide 
 and varying significance. As used here, it 
 has two meanings. During the earlier years 
 of the course, it is equivalent to the term 
 Naturbeschreibung as used in German school- 
 programmes. Applied to the later years, it 
 means the experimental study of chemistry 
 and physics. In the lower grades it is not 
 specifically physics or chemistry or geology 
 or botany or physiology or astronomy that 
 is studied, but something of all these. The 
 subject-matter is found in the facts of nature 
 which surround the child on every hand, and 
 which should be as familiar to him as the 
 names he hears. This instruction aims to 
 open the pupil's eyes, to teach him how and 
 what to see, and to appreciate what the word 
 nature means. It is the most fascinating of 
 school studies ; and it complements and runs 
 into almost every other subject. 
 
 5, 6 Latin and Greek In the secondary
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 173 
 
 schools of Europe, Latin still occupies the 
 leading place. Greek is begun later than 
 Latin, and when the Latin is well taught 
 Greek needs less time and effort for the mastery 
 of so much of it as is desirable during the 
 period of secondary instruction. Inasmuch as 
 both serve practically the same purpose in 
 education, they may properly be spoken of 
 under a single head. 
 
 It -seems quite safe to predict that no cult- 
 ure will ever be considered broad and deep 
 unless it rests upon an understanding and 
 appreciation of the civilizations of Greece and 
 Home. Whether such culture is necessary or 
 even desirable for the great body of the pop- 
 ulation, and whether the classics are properly 
 taught or not, are very different questions 
 from that which is raised as to their educa- 
 tional value. It is only as respects one or 
 the other of the former that recent criticism 
 and attack have been in any degree success- 
 ful. The classics have suffered from being 
 forced upon those who cared nothing for 
 them and would care nothing. They have 
 also suffered, and very severely, through the
 
 174 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 waste of time they have involved. But both 
 of these objections may be removed without 
 weakening in any degree the position of the 
 classics. To the charge of bad and wasteful 
 methods of classical teaching, much of it done 
 under the guise of thoroughness, the schools 
 must plead guilty. They have been endeav- 
 oring to make philologists out of the mate- 
 rial afforded by the average schoolboy. The 
 greatest value of the classics is found in the 
 ability to read and understand the great poets, 
 philosophers, and historians who wrote for all 
 time in the Greek and Latin tongues. The 
 boasted discipline of classical study for the 
 attention and reasoning powers may be quite 
 as well obtained from studies which touch 
 more closely the practical life of the great 
 mass of the population. This argument is, 
 therefore, not only unsound, but needless for 
 the classicist to use, since he has at his com- 
 mand others that are stronger and more effec- 
 tive. To know something of the spirit of 
 Sophocles, Demosthenes, and Plato, of Cicero, 
 Horace, and Tacitus, and to understand the 
 civilizations and the points of view that they
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 175 
 
 represent, are, from one point of view, almost 
 enough to give the fortunate one a claim to cult- 
 ure. The wearisome grammatical drill and the 
 tedious reiteration of details that are relatively 
 of little value, save in so far as these are abso- 
 lutely necessary to enable the 'pupil to read 
 intelligently, are out of place in secondary edu- 
 cation. The proper aim of classical instruction 
 at this period is stated with great clearness and 
 force in the comments on the course of study 
 furnished by the Prussian Minister of Public 
 Instruction to the teachers in the most suc- 
 cessful secondary school yet devised, the gym- 
 nasium. The Minister says : 
 
 "So far as the end to be attained by a know- 
 ledge of language is concerned, it is hardly neces- 
 sary to adduce arguments to justify the proposition 
 that the acquisition of a vocabulary is of at least 
 as much importance as familiarity with grammati- 
 cal details. For it is just by means of this vocabu- 
 lary that satisfaction is gained as facility in reading 
 is acquired ; by means of it, too, interest in reading 
 extends beyond the period of school life. The aim 
 of the gymnasium is not, however, attained when 
 the pupils are able merely to read works of a certain 
 degree of difficulty. Emphasis is much rather to
 
 176 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 be laid upon the fact that they have read works of a 
 certain scope and character, and upon the manner in 
 which they have read them. As regards the method 
 of reading, two points must be kept in mind; it 
 must be based upon verbal accuracy and it must 
 lead to an appreciation of the thought which is 
 expressed and the form chosen for its expression. 
 On the former consideration rests the disciplinary 
 value of the classics ; on the latter the basis of that 
 which, when fully developed, is designated as 
 classical culture. A treatment of this reading 
 which neglects grammatical and lexical exactness, 
 leads to superficiality; a treatment which makes 
 the acquisition of grammatical and lexical exact- 
 ness the main aim of reading, overlooks a funda- 
 mental reason for the teaching of Latin in the 
 gymnasium. Special attention must be called to 
 this latter error, for it endangers both the interest 
 of the students in the study of the ancient lan- 
 guages and the reputation of the gymnasium 
 among its most thoughtful supporters, by turning 
 the teaching of *the classics, even in the highest 
 grades, into a mere repetition of grammatical rules 
 and a memorizing of minute details as to synonyms 
 and style." 
 
 This applies to the United States quite as 
 well as to Prussia, and to the study of Greek
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 177 
 
 as much as to that of Latin. When these 
 directions are followed it will be easy enough 
 to read considerably more of the classics than 
 is now done in the secondary schools, and to 
 do it in the time at the teacher's disposal. It 
 may also be observed that the grammatical de- 
 tails of different languages, when alike, should 
 be studied once for all and not repeated for 
 every new language taken up. Devices for 
 carrying out this suggestion have been pre- 
 pared under the form of parallel grammars and 
 are now used in a few schools both in this 
 country and in Great Britain. 
 
 As a rule the classical teacher has not appre- 
 ciated the changed educational conditions and 
 the new demands made upon the schools. He 
 has therefore provoked antagonism when he 
 should have invited cooperation. He must 
 recognize that while the secondary school can- 
 not dispense with the classics, it can no longer 
 be completely dominated by them. 
 
 7 French and German These are indis- 
 pensable in the secondary school. It was 
 Goethe who said, " A man who knows only his 
 own language does not know even that."
 
 178 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 One modern language should be begun early 
 and studied continuously for several years. 
 To some it may seem a matter of indifference 
 whether French or German is first taken up. 
 But French seems to offer to the English- 
 speaking student more difficulties of pronun- 
 ciation and of idiom than German, and should 
 therefore be begun before the pupil has ac- 
 quired very fixed notions of grammatical and 
 rhetorical canons. Moreover, the relation be- 
 tween French and Latin seems to furnish a 
 good reason for making the two, to a certain 
 extent, interdependent and illustrative, the one 
 of the other. An ability to read French, to 
 understand it when spoken, and in some meas- 
 ure to write it and to speak it having been 
 attained, the mastery of a certain amount of 
 German will involve fewer difficulties, and the 
 boy may enter college or the scientific school 
 with a good reading knowledge, and perhaps 
 something more, of both of these indispensable 
 keys to culture ; or he may postpone the 
 second modern language until the college 
 period is entered upon. 
 
 8 Drawing and Constructive Work To in-
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 179 
 
 troduce this subject generally into the sec- 
 ondary schools of this country would be a 
 new departure. It is so, however, only be- 
 cause these schools have not been doing their 
 duty by the pupils entrusted to them. Taken 
 together, drawing and constructive work con- 
 stitute what is properly called manual training, 
 the educational value of which has been estab- 
 lished beyond all contravention both by argu- 
 ment and by experiment. It aims to develop 
 in the pupil powers of thought-expression that 
 no other study reaches, as well as to train the 
 judgment, to call out the executive powers, and 
 to give self-confidence in dealing with actual 
 material. It serves also to illustrate much of 
 the instruction in mathematics and in natural 
 science. Many secondary school pupils may 
 wish to follow manual training beyond the 
 mere rudiments and with more especial refer- 
 ence to its scientific and technological applica- 
 tions. 
 
 It may be added, for the sake of definite- 
 ness, that the constructive work will naturally 
 employ for its material pasteboard, clay, soft 
 wood, and metal, successively.
 
 180 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 9 Physical Training For obvious reasons 
 this important subject finds a place in every 
 part of the course. More time is to be allotted 
 to it in the earlier years because at that time the 
 pupil is less accustomed to the confinement of 
 the schoolroom and to the strain of continuous 
 mental exertion. At this stage, too, important 
 physical habits are formed, for instance those 
 of breathing, walking, and sitting ; and when 
 formed correctly they reduce somewhat the 
 time necessary for systematic bodily training. 
 Whenever possible this physical training 
 might be given in the open air of a play- 
 ground. Such an arrangement not only 
 involves a change of surroundings and conse- 
 quent rest for the pupil, but it means purer air 
 in the lungs, purer blood in the veins, and an 
 accompanying exhilaration that is in itself a 
 powerful tonic, mental and physical. A valua- 
 ble and indeed indispensable accessory of 
 physical training is play, the free, unimpeded, 
 wilful activity of the child. So great is its 
 value that many are of opinion that it makes 
 systematic physical training unnecessary. On 
 this point I shall merely quote Dr. Hartwell,
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 181 
 
 who seems to me to have correctly expressed 
 the relation between play and systematic 
 exercise in his admirable address before the 
 Physical Training Conference held in Boston 
 in November, 1889. Dr. Hartwell, in speak- 
 ing of this matter, said : 
 
 "I have no disposition to disparage athletic 
 sports. I would that they were more general and 
 better regulated than they are in our country. I 
 believe that they are valuable as a means of recrea- 
 tion ; that they conduce to bodily growth and im- 
 provement; and that their moral effects are of 
 value, since they call for self-subordination, public 
 spirit, and cooperative effort, and serve to reveal 
 the dominant characteristics and tendencies, as 
 regards the temper, disposition, and force of will 
 of those who engage in them. But they bear so 
 indelibly the marks of their childish origin, they 
 are so crude and unspecialized as to their methods, 
 as to render them inadequate for the purposes of a 
 thorough-going and broad system of bodily educa- 
 tion. It is well to promote them, and it is becom- 
 ing increasingly necessary to regulate them ; but it 
 is unsafe and short-sighted to consider them as 
 constituting anything more than a single stage in 
 the best bodily training."
 
 182 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 
 
 When play and physical training are thus 
 carefully distinguished, each is seen to have 
 an educational function of its own and neither 
 will be substituted for the other. Both are 
 necessary in education. 
 
 It is believed that a course made up of these 
 nine lines of study well distributed will meet 
 all the intellectual wants of the boy from his 
 eleventh to his eighteenth year, and will afford 
 him a harmonious and complete training. 
 Whether the pupil enters an institution of 
 higher grade or not, he will have had an edu- 
 cation substantially complete in itself. Yet 
 for the studies of a higher institution he will 
 have received an admirable preparation. The 
 secondary school is in this way enabled to 
 preserve its place in the general educational 
 organization of the country without sacrificing 
 its independence. 
 
 No less a man than Darwin has recorded 
 the fact that his school-days, so far as his 
 education was concerned, were an utter blank. 
 Not infrequently men of less reputation, but 
 yet prominent in their respective callings, 
 express a similar opinion. This in itself is
 
 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 183 
 
 a danger signal and must be heeded. The 
 school may not with impunity remain long 
 out of touch with the spirit which animates 
 the intellectual leaders of an age or generation. 
 Its task grows more difficult as civilization 
 grows more complex. "The most incessant 
 occupation of the human intellect throughout 
 life," said John Stuart Mill in his Inaugural 
 Address as Rector of St. Andrews University, 
 " is the ascertainment of truth." The standards 
 of truth and the methods for its discovery must 
 be revealed in and by the process of education. 
 When this process has been carried so far as to 
 entitle the resulting education to be called 
 liberal, as Huxley for example has defined 
 a liberal education, the youth is prepared to 
 live not for himself alone, but for the society of 
 which he forms a part and for the race of 
 which he is a member. If the secondary school 
 fails to obtain this larger view, its training will 
 hardly contribute to an education which shall 
 be, in the language of Rollin, " the source of 
 certain peace and happiness both in the family 
 and in the state."
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 IN THE UNITED STATES
 
 From The Atlantic Monthly, March, 1894
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 IN THE UNITED STATES 
 
 It has come to be distinctly recognized that 
 any far-reaching educational reform in the 
 United States must begin with the secondary 
 schools. The elementary school is helpless if 
 the secondary school refuses to cooperate with 
 it in raising the standard of scholarship and 
 in improving the methods of instruction ; and 
 but few colleges are strong enough to demand 
 of the secondary schools more and better work 
 than the latter are now doing. Persuasion on 
 the part of the colleges has in some cases ac- 
 complished a good deal, but the improvement 
 has been limited either to one or two subjects 
 of instruction, or to the schools of a relatively 
 small territory. The secondary schools them- 
 selves, not always conducted in a wise or gen- 
 erous spirit, have too often sacrificed the 
 necessities of sound training to the local de- 
 187
 
 188 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 mand for an ambitious programme containing 
 twoscore or more school subjects, no one of 
 which is pursued far enough or long enough 
 for the pupil to derive from it the educational 
 value it possesses. Or they have erred on the 
 other side, and in their devotion to a past ideal 
 have excluded from the curriculum important 
 fields of knowledge that have grown up within 
 a century. Thus the secondary school has ap- 
 peared to many observers not only to scatter 
 a pupil's energies and interests, but to delay 
 him unduly. The consequence is, as President 
 Eliot showed very clearly several years ago, 
 that the American boy of fifteen or sixteen, 
 no whit inferior to his French or German 
 fellow in native ability, is from two to three 
 years behind him in acquired knowledge. 
 
 To remedy so apparent an evil as this would 
 be an easy task in France or in Prussia. The 
 minister of education would consult his official 
 advisers, and call the leading educational ex- 
 perts to his council ; in a few weeks an order 
 would issue prescribing for the schools a new 
 and reformed procedure. In this way Lehr- 
 plane and Lehraufgaben for the higher schools
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 189 
 
 of Prussia were issued in 1882, and again in 
 1892. Similarly, in 1890 the existing Plan 
 d'Etudes et Programmes of the secondary 
 schools in France was promulgated. In this 
 country, however, where no central educational 
 administration exists, and where bureaucracy 
 is not popular, educational reforms can be 
 brought about only by persuasion and coopera- 
 tion, for no official and no institution is em- 
 powered to dictate to us. The press, the plat- 
 form, the teachers' meeting, must be availed of 
 to put forward new ideas ; and men and women 
 in large numbers must be reasoned with and 
 convinced in order to secure their acceptance. 
 For secondary education, and through it for 
 our educational organization generally, a long 
 step has been taken in this direction by the 
 proceedings that led up to the appointment, 
 by the National Educational Association, of 
 the Committee of Ten on secondary school 
 studies, and by the exceedingly valuable re- 
 port which that committee has now laid before 
 the public. 1 
 
 1 Published for the National Educational Association, by 
 the American Book Company (New York, 1894).
 
 190 REFOKM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 For thirty years the National Educational 
 Association has been known as a large body 
 of teachers that assembled annually to listen 
 to addresses and discussions of more or less 
 practical value. It has come to command an 
 attendance of as many as sixteen thousand 
 teachers, of all classes and from every section 
 of the country. Its power and authority have 
 increased with its size and its representative 
 character. In 1892, the directors of this asso- 
 ciation determined to pass from the field of 
 mere discussion, and begin an educational in- 
 vestigation, under their own auspices and paid 
 for out of their own funds, that should result 
 in some practical gain to the country at large. 
 They accepted the suggestion, made to them 
 after careful deliberation, that the problems 
 connected with secondary education should be 
 vigorously and systematically attacked, and 
 appointed a committee, which has come to be 
 known as the Committee of Ten, to take full 
 charge of the task, at the same time appropri- 
 ating twenty-five hundred dollars to pay the 
 expenses of the work. The members of this 
 committee were carefully selected with a view
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 191 
 
 to giving representation to the types of edu- 
 cational organization most interested, and to 
 the various sections of the country. 1 
 
 The committee was made up of one presi- 
 dent of an Eastern university, two presidents 
 of Western state universities and one of a 
 Southern state university, one president of a 
 college for women, one professor in a Western 
 college open to both sexes, one head-master 
 of an endowed academy, one principal of 
 a public high school for both sexes, one 
 principal of a public high school for girls 
 only, and the Commissioner of Education, 
 whose familiarity with the principles and 
 practice of education in every part of the 
 
 1 The members of the committee were : President Charles 
 W. Eliot, of Harvard University, chairman ; Dr. W. T. 
 Harris, Commissioner of Education ; President James B. 
 Angell, of the University of Michigan ; President James M. 
 Taylor, of Vassar College ; Mr. John Tetlow, Principal of 
 the Girls' High and Latin Schools, Boston, Mass. ; Mr. O. D. 
 Robinson, Principal of the Albany (N. Y.) High School; 
 President James H. Baker, of the University of Colorado ; 
 President Richard H. Jesse, of the University of Missouri ; 
 Mr. James C. MacKenzie, Head-Master of the Lawrenceville 
 (N. J.) School ; and Professor Henry C. King, of Oberlin 
 College.
 
 192 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 United States gave representation indirectly 
 both to the elementary school interests and 
 to the special students of education. 
 
 The procedure adopted by the Committee 
 of Ten is fully described in the report to 
 which it is the object of this paper to direct 
 attention. It may be briefly stated thus : 
 
 After a study of the whole problem, it was 
 decided to appoint nine conferences of ten 
 members each, one conference for each of 
 the main divisions of work that fall properly 
 to the secondary school. The members of the 
 conferences were selected equally, as nearly 
 as possible, from college and school instructors 
 who had attained a reputation in connection 
 with the subject of their conference, due re- 
 gard being had also to the representation of 
 various educational interests and the several 
 sections of the country. Conferences were 
 appointed, therefore, on Latin ; Greek ; Eng- 
 lish ; other modern languages ; mathemat- 
 ics ; physics, astronomy, and chemistry ; 
 natural history (biology, including botany, 
 zoology, and physiology) ; history, civil gov- 
 ernment, and political economy ; and geog-
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 193 
 
 raphy (physical geography, geology, and 
 meteorology). The several conferences as- 
 sembled in December, 1892, at convenient 
 points, and eighty-eight of the ninety members 
 were in attendance. Of these eighty-eight, 
 forty-six were in the service of colleges and 
 universities, forty-one in the service of schools, 
 and one was a government official formerly in 
 the service of a university. So admirable are 
 the lists of members of these conferences that 
 it is difficult to speak of them without enthu- 
 siasm. Among the ninety names will be found 
 many that stand in the foremost rank of Amer- 
 ican scholarship ; and no one of the ninety 
 was without valuable educational experience 
 of some kind. This fact of itself gives great 
 weight to their recommendations; and their 
 exhaustive reports, which are appended to the 
 Report of the Committee of Ten, are a mine 
 of educational information and suggestion of 
 the utmost value. 
 
 The nine conferences were in session for 
 three days, and addressed themselves to the 
 task of preparing answers to the searching 
 questions submitted to them by the Committee
 
 194 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 of Ten. These questions, eleven in number, 
 were as follows : 
 
 " (1) In the school course of study, ex- 
 tending approximately from the age of six 
 years to eighteen years, a course including 
 the periods of both elementary and secondary 
 instruction, at what age should the study 
 which is the subject of the Conference be first 
 introduced ? 
 
 " (2) After it is introduced, how many 
 hours a week for how many years should be 
 devoted to it? 
 
 " (3) How many hours a week for how 
 many years should be devoted to it during the 
 last four years of the complete course ; that 
 is, during the ordinary high school period? 
 
 " (4) What topics, or parts, of the subject 
 may reasonably be covered during the whole 
 course ? 
 
 " (5) What topics, or parts, of the subject 
 may best be reserved for the last four years? 
 
 " (6) In what form and to what extent 
 should the subject enter into college require- 
 ments for admission? Such questions as to 
 the sufficiency of translation at sight as a test
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 195 
 
 of knowledge of a language, or the superiority 
 of a laboratory examination in a scientific sub- 
 ject to a written examination on a text-book, 
 are intended to be suggested under this head 
 by the phrase 'in what form.' 
 
 " (7) Should the subject be treated differ- 
 ently for pupils who are going to college, for 
 those who are going to a scientific school, 
 and for those who, presumably, are going to 
 neither ? 
 
 " (8) At what stage should this differentia- 
 tion begin, if any be recommended? 
 
 " (9) Can any description be given of the 
 best method of teaching this subject through- 
 out the school course? 
 
 " (10) Can any description be given of the 
 best mode of testing attainments in this sub- 
 ject at college admission examinations? 
 
 " (11) For those cases in which colleges 
 and universities permit a division of the ad- 
 mission examinations into a preliminary and a 
 final examination, separated by at least a year, 
 can the best limit between the preliminary and 
 final examinations be approximately defined?" 
 
 The first impression produced by a study
 
 196 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 of the reports of the special conferences is 
 that their members addressed themselves to 
 their task with marked skill and directness. 
 The questions submitted to them are answered, 
 and answered fully, and the answers are ac- 
 companied with the reasons therefor. From 
 the standpoint of the old-fashioned prepara- 
 tory schoolmaster, ignorant alike of the newer 
 school subjects and of the newer methods of 
 imparting life to the old ones, the changes 
 urged by the conferences may seem many and 
 radical. Yet it will be difficult to disprove 
 the deliberate conclusion of the Committee of 
 Ten that, on the whole, the spirit of the con- 
 ferences was conservative and moderate. For 
 example, the Latin conference distinctly dis- 
 claim any desire to see the college admission 
 requirements in Latin increased. The Greek 
 conference prefer to see the average age of 
 entrance to college lowered rather than raised. 
 The mathematics conference recommend the 
 actual abridging of the time now devoted to 
 arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. The geog- 
 raphy conference agree that the time now 
 spent upon that subject in the schools is out
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 197 
 
 of all proportion to the value of the results 
 secured. 
 
 As a matter of course, the conferences 
 that dealt with the modern languages and 
 the several departments of natural science 
 had the largest amount of work to do. 
 Greek, Latin, and mathematics have been sta- 
 ple school subjects for generations. They are 
 carefully organized and graded. Adequate 
 text-books are provided. A large body of 
 teaching experience lies behind each of them. 
 Of the other subjects this is not true. They 
 appear only sporadically in schools. Too 
 often they are taught badly, and their edu- 
 cational value is lost. The conferences deal- 
 ing with the modern subjects make it clear, 
 in every case, how these evils may be 
 avoided ; but their reports are correspond- 
 ingly longer and more minute than those 
 on the other subjects. The conference on 
 physics, astronomy, and chemistry, for ex- 
 ample, append to their report an elaborate 
 outline of experiments to be performed and 
 topics to be taught in the secondary school. 
 The reports from the conferences on his-
 
 198 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 tory, civil government, and political econ- 
 omy, geography, and natural history are 
 similarly detailed. 
 
 The recommendations of the conference 
 on English will naturally be turned to first ; 
 for the tendency to emphasize the importance 
 of the study of the mother tongue, and to 
 improve the methods of teaching it, is now 
 too strong and too general to be resisted, if 
 indeed any one wishes to resist it. The 
 report of this conference is very short, but 
 it is extremely clear and cogent. In sub- 
 stance, it says that the proper use of Eng- 
 lish can be gained only by using it properly 
 in exercises of increasing difficulty and vari- 
 ety. The spelling-book is discountenanced. 
 Formal grammar is relegated to the subor- 
 dinate place that it deserves. The reading- 
 book should contain real literature, and not 
 articles on physical science or natural his- 
 tory, and but little sentimental poetry. In 
 the high school it is held that English should 
 have as much time allotted to it as Latin, 
 and that the two points to be kept con- 
 stantly in mind, in the teaching, are the
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 199 
 
 study of literature and training in the ex- 
 pression of thought. All this advice is so 
 sound that, being now given a quasi-official 
 authority, it should be followed generally 
 in the secondary schools, both public and 
 private. 
 
 The fact that education cannot be cut up 
 into artificial periods distinct in themselves 
 is brought out by almost every conference. 
 They agree in saying that the elementary 
 school must improve, and must cooperate 
 with the secondary school, if the latter is to 
 meet the demands now made upon it. Eng- 
 lish teaching cannot be neglected from six 
 to thirteen, if good results in it are to be 
 obtained from thirteen to seventeen. It is 
 facts like this that give the reports of the 
 conferences their chief significance. Though 
 dealing ostensibly and directly with second- 
 ary education only, they reach every nook 
 and corner of the elementary school as well. 
 
 It is extremely encouraging, also, to find 
 the nine conferences and the Committee of 
 Ten, one hundred teachers in all, in cordial 
 agreement on many points of fundamental
 
 200 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 importance. It is laid down, for instance, 
 that no school subject should be taught in 
 different ways to pupils who are going to 
 college, to a scientific school, or to neither. 
 If a pupil studies algebra or Latin, he should 
 study it in the same way and to the same 
 extent, during the time that he studies it, 
 whether he is to enter Harvard or Yale, the 
 Institute of Technology or the Rensselaer 
 Polytechnic, or a merchant's office. On this 
 point there is not a single dissenting voice. 
 This one principle, if followed in the sec- 
 ondary schools, would immensely simplify 
 their programmes and decrease the cost of 
 their instruction. 
 
 The conferences agree, again, excepting 
 the Greek conference, the members of which 
 had no reason for dealing with the subject, 
 that much work now taken up for the 
 first time in the secondary school should 
 be begun in the elementary school. For 
 instance, one foreign language, history, alge- 
 bra, and geometry are all capable of excel- 
 lent use in the upper grades of elementary 
 schools, and are already to be found there
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 201 
 
 in some of the more progressive cities of the 
 country. The discussion on shortening and 
 enriching the school curriculum, begun so 
 recently, has already accomplished this. 
 
 The four conferences on language study 
 and the three on natural science also agree 
 among themselves as to the best methods of 
 teaching. The former are a unit in desir- 
 ing reading aloud in the language to be 
 studied, the association of writing the lan- 
 guage with translating from it, and the care- 
 ful correction of translation, in order to 
 secure in it the use of accurate and idio- 
 matic English. The three scientific confer- 
 ences come to a like agreement. They all 
 believe that laboratory teaching is better, 
 than text-book teaching, and that the inspec- 
 tion of laboratory notebooks should be com- 
 bined with written examinations, in testing 
 a pupil's attainments. 
 
 The last, and most important, point of 
 agreement among the conferences relates to 
 the coordination of the studies in the cur- 
 riculum. Neither the Committee of Ten nor 
 the conferences contained a single person
 
 202 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 who may be classed as a follower of the 
 Herbartian educational theory, as exempli- 
 fied by Ziller, Stoy, and Rein ; yet by purely 
 empirical methods the committee and the 
 conferences arrive at a striking confirma- 
 tion of one of the main doctrines of the 
 Herbartian school, the coordination and cor- 
 relation of studies. The scientific confer- 
 ences show how the practice of writing 
 accurate descriptions of observations and 
 experiments contributes to the acquirement 
 of a clear, simple English style. The con- 
 ference on history wish to have that subject 
 always associated with the study of geogra- 
 phy, and the conference on the latter subject 
 agree with them. The English conference 
 explicitly ask that the study of the mother 
 tongue and its literature be supplemented by 
 that of the history and geography of the 
 English-speaking race. 
 
 Taking these points alone, and passing 
 over the numerous questions of detail on 
 which the conferences pronounce, we have 
 a considerable body of educational doctrine 
 that is sound to the core, and that applies
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 203 
 
 to one school and to one stage of educa- 
 tion as well as to another. Principals of 
 schools, teachers of special subjects, and 
 students of education will examine and 
 weigh carefully every recommendation of 
 the conferences, however minute ; but the 
 general reader and the intelligent parent 
 wish most of all to gain an idea of what is 
 unanimously, or even generally agreed upon. 
 That question is substantially answered in 
 the foregoing summary of the conference 
 reports. 
 
 To study carefully the several conference 
 reports, and to base upon them a general rec- 
 ommendation to the country, was the more 
 difficult part of the task of the Committee of 
 Ten. Any recommendation, to be tangible, 
 must of course include a schedule showing 
 how a school can arrange its programme so 
 as to carry out the ideal of the committee. 
 Four such schedules, or tables, are given by 
 the committee ; and while not perfect, what 
 school programme is? they are extremely 
 suggestive. The first table is not a pro- 
 gramme, but an ordered arrangement, by topics
 
 204 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 and school years, of all of the recommendations 
 of the nine conferences. It offers material 
 for an indefinite number of programmes. The 
 second table is given to test the practical char- 
 acter of the conference recommendations. It 
 includes them all in a four years' course, adding 
 to each subject the number of weekly periods 
 to be allotted to it. When this is done, it is 
 found that for three-fourths of the course 
 much more is demanded than any one pupil can 
 follow, but and this is the important point 
 not more than a school can teach. The ne- 
 cessary consequence is that there must be in 
 the high school a choice or election of studies. 
 In a small school, this choice will be made 
 by the principal, who will say : " With the 
 staff at my command, I can teach only five 
 subjects of those proposed by the conferences, 
 in the manner recommended. My school shall 
 therefore be limited to those five." Larger 
 and richer schools can teach more, or perhaps 
 all of the subjects ; and then the choice among 
 them will be made by the pupil. This choice 
 is necessary, as the Committee of Ten is care- 
 ful to point out, to thoroughness, and to the
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 205 
 
 imparting of power as distinguished from mere 
 information ; for any large subject whatever, 
 to yield its training value, must be pursued 
 through several years, from three to five times 
 a week. 
 
 The committee's third table is based on the 
 second, but uses four as the standard number 
 of weekly periods of study for each subject, 
 except in the first year of a new language. 
 Further reference to this table is unnecessary. 
 
 The fourth table submitted is of great 
 interest, for in it the committee, after due 
 deliberation, makes its own selection out of all 
 the material and suggestions supplied by the 
 conferences, and submits specimen standard 
 programmes of secondary school work. It 
 would.be a grave error to dismiss this ques- 
 tion of a specific programme as one involving 
 mere detail that might be left to any principal 
 or superintendent of schools. The Committee 
 of Ten itself dissents strongly from that view ; 
 for it believes that to establish just proportions 
 between the several subjects, or groups of 
 allied subjects, it is essential that each prin- 
 cipal subject shall be taught adequately and
 
 206 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 extensively, and therefore proper provision for 
 it must be made in the programme. As the 
 committee says : " The method of estimating 
 the amount of instruction offered in any sub- 
 ject by the number of recitation periods as- 
 signed to it each week for a given number 
 of years or half years is in some respects an 
 inadequate one, for it takes no account of 
 the scope and intensity of the instruction given 
 during the periods ; but so far as it goes it 
 is trustworthy and instructive. It represents 
 with tolerable accuracy the proportional ex- 
 penditure which a school is making on a given 
 subject ; therefore the proportional importance 
 which the school attaches to that subject. It 
 also represents, roughly, the proportion of the 
 pupil's entire school time which he can devote 
 to a given subject, provided he is free to take 
 all the instruction offered in that subject. All 
 experience shows that subjects deemed impor- 
 tant get a large number of weekly periods, 
 while those deemed unimportant get a smaller 
 number. Moreover, if the programme time 
 assigned to a given subject be insufficient, the 
 value of that subject as training cannot be got,
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 207 
 
 no matter how good the quality of the instruc- 
 tion." 
 
 In framing the suggestive programmes, the 
 Committee of Ten proceeded upon some gen- 
 eral principles that are of great significance. 
 In the first place, it endeavored to postpone 
 to as late a period as possible the grave choice 
 between a classical and what is generally 
 known as a Latin-scientific course. Very fre- 
 quently this choice determines a boy's future 
 career, and it is important that it be made 
 not only late in the school course, but after 
 excursions into all the principal fields of 
 knowledge have discovered the boy's tastes 
 and exhibited his qualities. A second prin- 
 ciple is that each year of the secondary 
 school course should be, so far as may be, 
 complete in itself, and not made wholly de- 
 pendent on what is to follow. This is essen- 
 tial, because thousands of pupils are obliged 
 to leave the high school after one or two years, 
 and during that time linguistic, historical, 
 mathematical, and scientific subjects should 
 all be presented to them in an adequate man- 
 ner. It is also important that provision be
 
 208 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 made so that each subject may be treated in 
 the same way for all pupils who take it ; that 
 time enough be given to each subject to gain 
 from it the training it is able to give ; that 
 the different principal subjects be put upon 
 an approximate equality in the matter of time- 
 allotment ; that all short courses given for 
 purposes of information only be excluded ; and 
 that the instruction in each of the main lines 
 namely, language, history, science, and 
 mathematics be continuous. With all of 
 these principles in mind, the Committee of Ten 
 framed the four specimen programmes given on 
 the three following pages, the names by which 
 they are designated being based on the amount 
 and character of foreign language study in each. 
 In adopting twenty as the maximum num- 
 ber of weekly periods of school work, the com- 
 mittee had two qualifications in mind : first, 
 that at least five of the twenty should be given 
 to unprepared work ; secondly, that laboratory 
 subjects should have double periods whenever 
 that prolongation is possible. Such subjects 
 as music, drawing, and elocution, often found 
 in secondary schools, are purposely omitted from
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 209 
 
 3 
 
 I 
 
 Classical 
 
 Three Foreign Languages (one 
 
 Modern) 
 
 II 
 
 Latik-Scikntifio 
 
 Two Foreign Languages (one 
 
 Modern) 
 
 1 
 
 Algebra .... 4 p. 
 Physical Geography 3 p. 
 
 Physical Geography 3 p. 
 
 
 20 p. 
 
 20 p. 
 
 2 
 
 German 2 [or French] 
 
 begun .... 4 p. 
 Geometry .... 3 p. 
 
 History .... 3 p. 
 
 German [or French] 
 
 begun .... 4 p. 
 Geometry .... 3 p. 
 
 Botany or Zoology . 3 p. 
 
 
 20 p. 
 
 20 p. 
 
 3 
 
 Greek 2 5 p. 
 
 German [or French] 4 p. 
 
 Mathematics 
 Algebra, 21 4 
 Geometry, 2 / * ' * p< 
 
 German [or French] 4 p. 
 Mathematics 
 
 Algebra, 2\ . 
 
 Geometry ,2 / " ' p- 
 Astronomy (J year) 
 
 and Meteorology 
 
 (Jyr.) . . . . 3 p. 
 
 
 20 p. 
 
 20 p. 
 
 1 Weekly periods. 
 
 2 In any school in which Greek can be better taught than 
 a modern Umgnage, or in which local public opinion or the 
 history of the school makes it desirable to teach Greek in an 
 ample way, Greek may be substituted for German or French 
 in the second year of the classical programme.
 
 210 EEFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 II 
 
 
 9 
 
 Classical 
 
 
 Latin -Scientific 
 
 
 
 Three Foreign Languages (one 
 
 Two Foreign Languages 
 
 one 
 
 
 Modern) 
 
 
 Modern) 
 
 
 
 
 4 p. 
 
 
 4 p. 
 
 
 
 5 p. 
 
 English 
 
 
 
 
 2 p. 
 
 as in Classical, 2 \ 
 additional, 2 J 
 
 4 p. 
 
 
 German [or French] 
 
 3 p. 
 
 
 Chemistry .... 
 
 3 p. 
 
 German [or French] 
 
 3 p. 
 
 
 Trigonometry and 
 
 
 Chemistry .... 
 
 3 p. 
 
 4 
 
 Higher Algebra, 
 
 
 Trigonometry and 
 
 
 or History . . . 
 
 3 p. 
 
 Higher Algebra, 
 
 
 
 
 
 or History . . . 
 
 3 p. 
 
 
 
 
 Geology or Physiog- 
 
 
 
 
 
 raphy (yr.), and 
 
 
 
 
 
 Anatomy, Physi- 
 
 
 
 
 
 ology, and Hygiene 
 
 
 
 
 
 (Jyr.) . . . . 
 
 3 p. 
 
 
 20 p. 
 
 20 p. 
 
 m 
 3 
 
 a 
 
 III 
 
 Modern Languages 
 
 Two Foreign Languages (both 
 
 Modern) 
 
 IV 
 
 English 
 
 One Foreign Language (Ancient 
 
 or Modern) 
 
 1 
 
 French [or German] 
 begun .... 5 p. 
 
 Algebra .... 4 p. 
 History .... 4 p. 
 Physical Geography 3 p. 
 
 Latin, or German, or 
 French .... 6 p. 
 
 Physical Geography 3 p. 
 
 
 20 p. 
 
 20 p. 
 
 2 
 
 French [or German] 
 
 German [or French] 
 
 begun .... 5 p. 
 Geometry .... 3 p. 
 Physics .... 3 p. 
 Botany or Zoology . 3 p. 
 
 Latin, or German, 
 
 or French . . 6 or 4 p. 
 English . . . . 3 or 5 p. 
 Geometry .... 3 p. 
 
 Botany or Zoology . 3 p. 
 
 
 20 p. 
 
 20 p.
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 211 
 
 3 
 
 III 
 
 Modern Languagxs 
 
 Two Foreign Languages (both 
 
 Modern) 
 
 IV 
 
 English 
 
 One Foreign Language (Ancient 
 
 or Modern) 
 
 8 
 
 French [or German] 4 p. 
 
 German [or French] 4 p. 
 
 Mathematics 
 Algebra, 2 ) , 
 Geometry, 2 / * ' * p ' 
 
 Astronomy ($ year) 
 and Meteorology 
 (*yr.) . . . . 3 p. 
 
 Latin, or German, or 
 French .... 4 p. 
 
 English 
 as in others, 3 \ K 
 additional, 2/ ' p * 
 
 Mathematics 
 Algebra, 21 . 
 Geometry, 2 / " ' v ' 
 
 Astronomy (J yr.) 
 and Meteorology 
 (Jyr.) . . . . 3 p. 
 
 History 
 as in Latin-Scien- > 
 
 tific, 2 V 3 p. 
 additional, 2 ) 
 
 
 20 p. 
 
 30 p. 
 
 4 
 
 French [or German] 3 p. 
 
 English 
 as in Classical, 2 \ . 
 additional, 2 J p * 
 
 German [or French] 4 p. 
 
 Chemistry .... 3 p. 
 
 Trigonometry and 
 Higher Algebra, 
 or History . . . 3 p. 
 
 Geology or Physiog- 
 raphy (J yr. and 
 Anatomy, Physi- 
 ology, and Hygiene 
 (Jyr.) . . . . 3 p. 
 
 Latin, or German, or 
 French .... 4 p. 
 
 English 
 as in Classical, 2 \ , 
 additional, 2 / p * 
 
 Chemistry . . . 3 p. 
 
 Trigonometry and 
 Higher Algebra . 3 p. 
 
 Geology or Physiog- 
 raphy ( yr.), and 
 Anatomy, Physi- 
 ology, and Hygiene 
 (Jyr.) . . . . 3 p. 
 
 
 20 p. 
 
 20 p.
 
 212 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 the programmes, it being left to local authorities 
 to determine how they shall be introduced. 
 
 Inspection will show how carefully the pro- 
 grammes have been framed with reference to 
 being carried out economically in a single 
 school. With few exceptions, the several sub- 
 jects occur simultaneously in at least three of 
 the four programmes, and with the same num- 
 ber of weekly periods allotted to them. From 
 a practical point of view this is a most impor- 
 tant arrangement. Some minor difficulties 
 were caused by adhering to the rule laid down 
 by all of the language conferences, namely, 
 that two foreign languages should not be 
 begun at the same time, and by limiting the 
 course to four years. A six years' programme 
 would be far easier to construct. 
 
 Critical examination of the committee's pro- 
 grammes discloses grave defects in the most 
 important of all, the classical, which does not 
 provide continuous study in science, for that 
 great department is not represented in the 
 third year at all. History is similarly inter- 
 fered with, and there would also be a break in 
 the mathematical course if the option given in
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 213 
 
 the fourth year were exercised in favor of his- 
 tory. The difficulty lies, I believe, in trying 
 to include history in a four years' classical 
 course. The classics themselves teach history 
 in an admirable way, if the instruction is 
 good. A wealth of historical knowledge is 
 grouped about the reading of Caesar, Cicero, 
 and Virgil, Xenophon and Homer, the usual 
 secondary school authors ; and in those which 
 are themselves professedly historical, a great 
 gain would follow from more thorough study 
 of the subject matter. If history, then, were 
 dropped entirely from this programme, a mod- 
 ern language could be begun in the first sec- 
 ondary school year, the English course extended 
 in the second year, and no break in the science 
 instruction would be necessary. 
 
 Defects in the other programmes exist, but 
 they are not so glaring as those just pointed 
 out in the classical. For instance, there is no 
 continuity in the history course of the Latin- 
 scientific or modern language programme ; and 
 in both of the last-named there would be a 
 break in the mathematics course also, should 
 the pupil exercise his option in favor of history.
 
 214 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 The following table discloses at a glance in 
 what relation the four programmes stand to 
 each of the four great divisions of secondary 
 school study. The figures in the several col- 
 umns represent the total number of weekly 
 periods given during the entire four years, in 
 each of the four programmes, to the main sub- 
 jects. No scheme can be called radical that pro- 
 poses to give 52.5 per cent of all secondary edu- 
 cation whatsoever to language study, or, adding 
 history, 62.8 per cent to the so-called humanities. 
 That this would be the result of following the 
 committee's recommendations the table shows. 
 
 
 H 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 E 
 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 
 5 
 
 u 
 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 
 -! 
 
 H g 
 
 - K 
 
 o 
 
 H 
 
 
 d 
 
 * 5 
 
 o 3 
 
 85 
 
 O 
 
 
 O 
 
 H^OQ 
 
 s.3 
 
 H 
 
 H 
 
 
 50 
 
 42 
 
 42 
 
 34 
 
 168 
 
 
 7 
 
 6 
 
 6 
 
 14 
 
 33 
 
 Mathematics .... 
 
 14 
 
 14 
 
 14 
 
 14 
 
 56 
 
 Natural Science . . . 
 
 9 
 
 18 
 
 18 
 
 18 
 
 63 
 
 Total 
 
 80 
 
 80 
 
 80 
 
 80 
 
 320 
 
 This table brings out other interesting facts. 
 It shows how closely allied are the Latin-
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 215 
 
 scientific and modern language courses, and 
 how small a part natural science is to play in 
 the revised scheme, after all. The one-quarter 
 of the whole school time that the scientific 
 conferences asked to have given to natural 
 science is not so given in any of the pro- 
 grammes, though it is closely approached in 
 three of them. 
 
 Although the report itself contains no refer- 
 ence to European experience or practice, it 
 will be interesting to compare the committee's 
 recommendations with the programmes of Eu- 
 ropean secondary schools. Take, for example, 
 the Prussian gymnasium, the tertia and se- 
 cunda of which nearly correspond to the 
 American secondary school years, and the 
 French lycee, where the classes known as 
 cinquidme, quatrieme, troisieme, and seconde 
 are in about the same relation. The division 
 of time in these institutions is shown on the 
 following page.
 
 216 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 PRUSSIAN GYMNASIUM 
 
 
 
 
 OS 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 9 
 S 
 
 i 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 | 
 
 A 
 
 
 
 
 
 B 
 
 SO 
 
 
 
 
 H 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 Subjects 
 
 B 
 
 
 I 
 
 1 
 en 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 6 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 OS 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 o 
 
 
 p 
 
 o 
 
 P 
 
 o 
 
 H 
 
 
 2 
 
 2 
 
 2 
 
 2 
 
 8 
 
 
 2 
 
 2 
 
 3 
 
 3 
 
 10 
 
 
 7 
 
 7 
 
 7 
 
 6 
 
 27 
 
 
 6 
 
 6 
 
 6 
 
 6 
 
 24 
 
 
 3 
 
 3 
 
 3 
 
 2 
 
 11 
 
 History and Geography . 
 
 3 
 
 3 
 
 3 
 
 3 
 
 12 
 
 
 3 
 
 3 
 
 4 
 
 4 
 
 14 
 
 Natural History, Physics, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 and Chemistry . . . 
 
 2 
 
 2 
 
 2 
 
 2 
 
 8 
 
 
 28 
 
 28 
 
 30 
 
 28 
 
 114 
 
 FRENCH LYCfiE 
 
 Subjects 
 
 
 a 
 'S3 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 
 A 
 
 
 1 
 
 i 
 
 l 
 
 8 
 
 s 
 
 
 o 
 
 c 
 
 H 
 
 33 
 
 H 
 
 
 3 
 
 2 
 
 2 
 
 3 
 
 10 
 
 
 8 
 
 5 
 
 5 
 
 5 
 
 23 
 
 
 2 1 
 
 6 
 
 5 
 
 5 
 
 18 
 
 Other Living Language . 
 
 H 
 
 1* 
 
 1* 
 
 2* 
 
 7 
 
 
 H 
 
 1* 
 
 1* 
 
 1* 
 
 6 
 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 4 
 
 Mathematics \ 
 Natural Science j ' ' 
 
 I* 2 
 
 1* 
 
 3 
 
 I* 
 
 7* 
 
 
 18* 
 
 18* 
 
 19 
 
 19* 
 
 75* 
 
 1 Greek is not begun until the second half of the year. 
 Previous to that time ten hours weekly are given to Latin. 
 
 2 This time is divided between observation lessons on rocks 
 and plants and arithmetic.
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 217 
 
 It is seen at once that the German boy is 
 called upon for far more work, measured in 
 terms of time, than the American boy ; though 
 the difference is not so great as it seems, for 
 "learning lessons" out of school is not so 
 prominent a feature in German as it is in 
 American education. The French boy, under 
 the existing revised programme, does about 
 what is to be expected of the American, but 
 his time is differently distributed. The French 
 device for preventing " scrappy " courses from 
 becoming intolerable is to assign them few 
 but long periods. For example, history, in 
 the lycee, is taught but once a week, but 
 then it occupies an hour and a half consecu- 
 tively, so that much more is accomplished than 
 in two periods of forty -five minutes each. As 
 a rule, the recitation or lesson periods in France 
 are considerably longer than those that are usual 
 elsewhere. 
 
 In spite of the differences between them, 
 however, it is clear that the proposed Ameri- 
 can classical programme is not very unlike 
 those in vogue on the continent of Europe. 
 Were the comparison extended to the other pro-
 
 218 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 grammes, the Latin-scientific, the modern 
 language, and the English, a similar relation 
 to the French and German programmes of like 
 character would be found to exist. The higher 
 classes of the gymnasium and the lycee have 
 still a great advantage over the American 
 secondary school in the fact that the work 
 leading up to them is carefully organized and 
 developed, and may be depended upon. The 
 American grammar school, or better, the upper 
 grades of the elementary school, on the con- 
 trary, is only here and there efficient. For 
 two generations the so-called grammar school 
 has conspired with the lower or primary grades 
 to retard the intellectual progress of the pupil 
 in the interest of " thoroughness." The arith- 
 metic of many puzzles, the formal grammar, 
 and the spelling-book with its long lists of 
 child-frightening words have been its weapons. 
 Slowly and with a struggle these are being 
 wrested from it. New knowledge is being 
 introduced to illustrate and illuminate the old, 
 and higher processes to explain and make 
 easier the lower. All this promotes true thor- 
 oughness; and also allows the child's mind to
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 219 
 
 grow and develop as nature intended it should, 
 and as it often does in spite of the elemen- 
 tary school, not because of it. Every year, 
 therefore, pupils are reaching the high school 
 better prepared for its peculiar work ; and it 
 is not unreasonable to hope that in ten years 
 the secondary school may assume, in the case 
 of its youngest pupils, an ability to use simple 
 English correctly, a knowledge of the elements 
 of algebra and geometry, and of some epoch 
 or movement in history. Perhaps even the 
 study of a foreign language will have been 
 begun. 
 
 From the standpoint of the elementary 
 school, therefore, the Committee of Ten is 
 not unreasonable in its ideal, nor have the 
 conferences proposed anything that is imprac- 
 ticable. The same is true when the report 
 is viewed from the standpoint of the colleges, 
 though here, too, reform and improvement are 
 necessary. As is well known, college admis- 
 sion examinations not only differ widely among 
 themselves, but vary from year to year. Per- 
 haps no one of them is too high to admit of a 
 well-taught boy entering college at seventeen,
 
 220 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 but many are so low that the same boy ought 
 to pass them successfull} 7- at fourteen, or even 
 earlier. The colleges have been injuring higher 
 education in America by giving their own idio- 
 syncrasies as to admission examinations free 
 scope, instead of agreeing together upon a 
 policy. 
 
 I do not mean that the admission examina- 
 tions of all colleges should be uniform ; that 
 is not necessary. But, to quote from the re- 
 port, " it is obviously desirable that the col- 
 leges and scientific schools should be accessible 
 to all boys or girls who have completed cred- 
 itably the secondary school course." If the 
 recommendations of the Committee of Ten are 
 carried out, and there is every reason to 
 hope that they will be, the "completion of 
 a secondary school course " will have a defi- 
 nite meaning, and the colleges can deal with 
 it accordingly. The graduate of a secondary 
 school will have had four years of strong and 
 effective mental training, no matter which of 
 the four school programmes he has followed, 
 and the college can safely admit him to its 
 courses. This single step will bring about
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 221 
 
 the articulation of the colleges and scientific 
 schools, on the one hand, with the secondary 
 schools, on the other, an articulation that 
 has long been recognized as desirable for both 
 classes of institutions and for the country. 
 
 The question will naturally arise, it arose 
 in the minds of the Committee of Ten, Can 
 the improvements suggested be effectually car- 
 ried out without a very considerable improve- 
 ment in the training of the teachers who are to 
 do the work ? To this question but one answer 
 can be given, and that in the negative. But, on 
 the other hand, the opportunities now available 
 for the higher training of secondary school- 
 teachers are many times as numerous and as 
 valuable as they were a decade ago. It is 
 true that the hundreds of normal schools are 
 accomplishing very little in this direction, even 
 the best of them ; but the colleges and uni- 
 versities, where the mass of secondary teachers 
 will always be educated and trained, have 
 now awakened to a sense of the responsibil- 
 ity that rests upon them. Harvard and Yale, 
 Columbia and Cornell, Michigan and Illinois, 
 Colorado and Stanford, and many others have
 
 22 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 organized special departments for the study 
 of education, and one or two of them are 
 manned and equipped more thoroughly than 
 any similar departments in Europe. The effect 
 of this great expansion of activity in the study 
 of education cannot fail to be widely felt 
 within the next few years. The colleges have 
 needed, and some of them still need, an en- 
 largement of sympathies, as do the normal 
 schools. The colleges have focused their at- 
 tention and energy too largely upon their own 
 special work, and have paid no heed to what 
 was going on about and beneath them. The 
 normal schools have thought it sufficient to 
 study more or less psychology, and to expound 
 more or less dubious "methods" of teaching, 
 and have neglected the larger field of genuine 
 culture and the relative values of studies. 
 Better apparatus and more teachers will not 
 of themselves lift the college or the normal 
 school out of its rut. Only a full appreciation 
 of the relations of these institutions to the 
 work of education as a whole can do that. 
 
 Finally, what is the effect of this pro- 
 longed and earnest investigation upon that
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 223 
 
 ideal of a liberal education that has so long 
 been held in esteem among us ? It will not 
 have escaped notice that only one of the com- 
 mittee's four programmes makes a place for the 
 study of Greek, while one excludes both Greek 
 and Latin. It is true that these are recom- 
 mended as ideal arrangements, and that it is 
 expressly stated in the report to be the unani- 
 mous opinion of the committee that, "under 
 existing conditions in the United States as to 
 the training of teachers and the provision of 
 necessary means of instruction, the two pro- 
 grammes called respectively modern languages 
 and English must, in practice, be distinctly 
 inferior to the other two." Nevertheless, it 
 seems clear that the committee has been able to 
 disentangle the real from the accidental in our 
 conception of a liberal education, and has put 
 the former forward in all its strength. It has 
 not forgotten the precept of Aristotle, that 
 " there are branches of learning and education 
 which we must study with a view to the enjoy- 
 ment of leisure," and that "these are to be 
 valued for their own sake." "It is evident, 
 then," the philosopher continues, "that there
 
 224 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 is a sort of education in which parents should 
 train their sons, not as being useful or neces- 
 sary, but because it is liberal and noble. 
 Whether this is of one kind only, or of more 
 than one, and if so, what they are and how they 
 are to be imparted, must hereafter be deter- 
 mined." It is just this determination that the 
 committee has made ; and it is a determination 
 that each age, perhaps each generation, must 
 make for itself. Between a diminution of the 
 time given to classical study and a relapse into 
 quasi-barbarism there is no necessary relation 
 of cause and effect. May not the American 
 say, as did Paulsen of his countrymen, that 
 "idealism generally, if we will use this word 
 of so many meanings, is a thing which is not 
 implanted from without, but grows from 
 within, and that, in particular, the idealism in 
 the character of the German people has deeper 
 roots than the Greek and Latin lessons of our 
 gymnasia " ? Is it not true that the other ele- 
 ments of culture must be given their proper 
 place in secondary education, and that gain 
 rather than loss will follow from so doing ? 
 Lowell's hope, expressed so eloquently at
 
 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 225 
 
 the Harvard Anniversary, will not be disap- 
 pointed by the recognition of a broader basis 
 for human culture. Every one may accept the 
 recommendations of the Committee of Ten, and 
 still say with him : " I hope the day may never 
 come when the weightier matters of a language, 
 namely, such parts of its literature as have 
 overcome death by reason of their wisdom and 
 the beauty in which it is incarnated, such parts 
 as are universal by reason of their civilizing 
 properties, their power to elevate and fortify 
 the mind, I hope the day may never come 
 when these are not predominant in the teach- 
 ing given here. Let the Humanities be main- 
 tained undiminished in their ancient right. 
 Leave in the traditional preeminence those arts 
 that were rightly called liberal ; those studies 
 that kindle the imagination, and through it 
 irradiate the reason ; those studies that manu- 
 mitted the modern mind ; those in which the 
 brains of finest temper have found alike their 
 stimulus and their repose, taught by them that 
 the power of intellect is heightened in propor- 
 tion as it is made gracious by measure and sym- 
 metry. Give us science, too, but give first of 
 q
 
 226 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 
 
 all, and last of all, the science that ennobles 
 life and makes it generous. . . . Many-sided- 
 ness of culture makes our vision clearer and 
 keener in particulars. For after all, the 
 noblest definition of Science is that breadth 
 and impartiality of view which liberates the 
 mind from specialties, and enables it to organ- 
 ize whatever we learn, so that it becomes real 
 Knowledge by being brought into true and 
 helpful relation with the rest."
 
 INDEX 
 
 Adams, President Charles Ken- 
 dall, 167. 
 
 Aim of education in a democ- 
 racy, 112. 
 
 American and German organi- 
 zation of higher education 
 compared, 135. 
 
 Amiel, 40. 
 
 Apperception, doctrine of, 82. 
 
 Aquiuas, Thomas, 39, 50. 
 
 Aristotle, 42, 72, 73, 109. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 53; his defi- 
 nition of culture, 53 ; on sec- 
 ondary schools, 151. 
 
 Art in education, 22. 
 
 Atomic individualism, 25. 
 
 Augustine, 50. 
 
 Azarias, Brother, 52. 
 
 Bagehot, 105. 
 Beethoven, 51. 
 Bentham, 70. 
 Berkeley, 43. 
 Bonnet, 65. 
 Bopp, 47. 
 Browning, 65. 
 Bruno, 42. 
 Bryce, James, 105. 
 Burgers tein, 75. 
 Burke, 106. 
 
 Carlyle, 105. 
 Cayley, 45. 
 Champollion, 46. 
 
 Chicago University, 135. 
 
 Cicero, 174. 
 
 Civil Service Reform, 116. 
 
 Collectivism, stagnation the 
 result of, 26. 
 
 College, the American, 89, 130 ; 
 distinguished from univer- 
 sity, 125; aim of, 131; ad- 
 mission examinations, 88, 
 221. 
 
 Columbia University, 135, 221. 
 
 Committee of Ten, 189; mem- 
 bership of, 191; procedure 
 of, 192: conclusions of, 203; 
 criticism of, 212. 
 
 Comte, 44. 
 
 Condillac, 65. 
 
 Coordination of studies, 202. 
 
 Culture, five aspects of, 17; 
 definition of, 33. 
 
 Dante, 38, 48. 
 Darwin, 71, 102, 182. 
 da Vinci, Leonardo, 51. 
 Democracy, progress of, 103; 
 
 literature of, 105 ; relation of 
 
 education to, 108; dangers 
 
 of, 119. 
 Demosthenes, 174. 
 Descartes, 15, 43, 45. 
 de Tocqueville, 105. 
 Drawing and constructive 
 
 work, 178. 
 du Bois-Reymond, 145. 
 
 227
 
 228 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Economics, importance of, in 
 education, 91. 
 
 Education, definition of, 17; 
 basis of, in evolution, 6; as 
 adjustment to environment, 
 15 ; not identical with in- 
 struction, 16; scientific study 
 of, 71; threefold approach 
 to, 71; departments of, in 
 colleges and universities, 
 221. 
 
 Educational values, standards 
 of, 50. 
 
 Einheitsschule, 162, 163. 
 
 Elementary education, scope 
 of, 152. 
 
 Eliot, President, 157, 188. 
 
 Emerson, 64. 
 
 Energy and will, 43. 
 
 English, study of, 164, 198. 
 
 Erasmus, 53, 54. 
 
 Ethics and politics, 109. 
 
 Evolution, doctrine of, 4, 14; 
 and education, 6, 70. 
 
 " Experience," danger of, in 
 education, 77. 
 
 Family, origin of the, 11. 
 
 Fichte, 42. 
 
 Fiske, John, 5, 10, 13, 38. 
 
 Freedom of the will, 64. 
 
 Froehel, 55. 
 
 Froude, 58. 
 
 Galileo, 39. 
 Galle, 44. 
 Gauss, 45. 
 
 Geography, study of, 168. 
 Gladstone, 71. 
 Goethe, 33, 48, 177. 
 Greek, study of, 172. 
 Grimm, 47, 93. 
 
 Gymnasium, table of studies 
 in. 216. 
 
 Hall, Dr. G. Stanley, 138. 
 
 Hamilton, Sir William, 50; on 
 the study of mathematics, 
 170. 
 
 Harris, Dr. W. T., 86. 
 
 Hartwell, Dr. E. M., on physi- 
 cal training and play, 181. 
 
 Harvard University, 135, 139, 
 141, 155. 
 
 Hawthorne, 65. 
 
 Hegel, 41, 43. 
 
 Helmholtz, 102. 
 
 Herbart, 81, 202. 
 
 Herder, 33. 
 
 Herschel, 102. 
 
 History, study of, 168. 
 
 Hofmann, 145. 
 
 Homer, 48. 
 
 Horace, 174. 
 
 Humanism, 53. 
 
 Humanitas, 20, 33. 
 
 Humanities, the, 20. 
 
 Huxley, 102, 183. 
 
 Individualism, evils of extreme, 
 25. 
 
 Infancy, meaning of, 6 ; in man, 
 9, 12. 
 
 Institutional element in educa- 
 tion, the, 25. 
 
 Interest, doctrine of, 84. 
 
 Jansen, 39. 
 
 Johns Hopkins University, 135, 
 139, 141, 144. 
 
 Kant, 41,43. 
 Kempis, Thomas a, 51. 
 Kidd's Social Evolution, 101. 
 
 Lamarck, 42. 
 Latin, study of, 172. 
 Lecky, W. E. H., 105. 
 Leibniz, 43, 45, 71, 88. 
 Liberal education, 91, 222.
 
 INDEX 
 
 229 
 
 Literature in education, 19, 55. 
 
 Lobachevsky, 45. 
 
 Locke, 64. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell, 224. 
 
 Lyce'e, table of studies in, 216. 
 
 Lyell, 102. 
 
 Maine, Sir Henry, 105. 
 
 Man, place of, iu the universe, 
 
 38. 
 Mandeville, 70. 
 
 Manual training, 153, 162, 179. 
 Mathematics, study of, 170. 
 Michael Angelo, 48. 
 Mill, John Stuart, 103, 183. 
 Milton, 47, 56. 
 Modern European languages, 
 
 study of, 177. 
 Montaigne, 39. 
 Mosso, 75. 
 Mozart, 51. 
 Miiller, 102. 
 
 National Educational Associa- 
 tion, 116, 189, 190. 
 Natural science, study of, 172. 
 Newton, 45. 
 Nordau, 40. 
 
 wai&eia, 33. 
 
 Parker, Colonel Francis W., 84. 
 
 Pater, 54. 
 
 Paulsen, Professor Friedrich, 
 
 91, 137, 144, 165, 224. 
 Petrarch, 53. 
 Phidias, 48. 
 Philosophical faculty the centre 
 
 of the university. 144. 
 Physical training in education, 
 
 180 ; distinguished from play, 
 
 181. 
 Physical conditions of sound 
 
 education, 74. 
 Plato, 16, 42, 43, 50, 109, 174. 
 
 Play in education, 73; rtistin- 
 guished from physical train- 
 ing, 181. 
 
 Politics, participation of edu- 
 cated persons in, 109. 
 
 Psychology, relation of, to edu- 
 cation, 76. 
 
 Raphael, 48, 51. 
 
 Rayleigh, Lord, 45. 
 
 Rein, 202. 
 
 Religious element in education, 
 28. 
 
 Research in American universi- 
 ties, 138. 
 
 Riemann, 45. 
 
 Roentgen, 102. 
 
 Rollin, 183. 
 
 Rousseau, 25, 28, 50, 73. 
 
 Royce, Professor Josiah, 80. 
 
 Schelling, 55. 
 
 Scherer, 105. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 40. 
 
 Science in education, 18, 56, 172. 
 
 Secondary education, 151; 
 scope of, 153; poor teaching 
 in, 159; complete in itself, 
 154, 207 ; in the United States 
 and in Europe compared, 156 ; 
 selective function of, 160; 
 suggested course of study 
 for, 162 ; the pivot of educa- 
 tional reform, 187 ; Commit- 
 tee of Ten's proposals for, 203. 
 
 Self-activity, 6, 42, 46, 47. 
 
 Shakspere, 47, 48, 51. 
 
 Sociological aspect of educa- 
 tion, 86. 
 
 Socrates, 25, 70. 
 
 Sophists, the, 25. 
 
 Sophocles, 174. 
 
 Specialization, dangers of ex- 
 cessive, 146.
 
 230 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 41, 42, 50. 
 
 Spinoza, 42. 
 
 Spoils system of treating public 
 
 offices, 116. 
 Standards, low, of professional 
 
 and technical schools, 142. 
 State, the democratic, 110; 
 
 duty of the individual 
 
 toward, 111. 
 Sturm, 53. 
 Stoy, 202. 
 Superior education, scope of, 
 
 152. 
 Sylvester, 45. 
 
 Tacitus, 130, 174. 
 
 Teaching in American universi- 
 ties, 138. 
 
 Technical schools, influence of, 
 on secondary education, 161. 
 
 Ten, Committee of, 189 ; mem- 
 bership of, 191 ; procedure of, 
 192; conclusions of, 203; 
 criticism of, 212. 
 
 Thought, primacy of, 43, 47. 
 Tyndall, 61. 
 
 University, definition of, 130; 
 
 no common type of, 127. 
 Urbanitas, 33. 
 Utility in education, 60. 
 
 Vacation, length of, 157. 
 Verner, 47, 93. 
 von Baer, 42, 102. 
 von Hoist, Professor, on Ameri- 
 can universities, 127. 
 
 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 5. 
 Warner, Dr. Francis, 75. 
 Whewell, 50, 
 
 Will, modern view of, 43 ; free- 
 dom of, 64. 
 Wundt, 49. 
 
 Ziller, 202.
 
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