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 An Address Before the 
 Sub-Committee of the Boston 
 School Board 
 
 By 
 ■;:.?. Atkinson
 
 LSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE OllGANIZATIO^ OF IIIGII SCHOOLS. 
 
 AN ADDRESS 
 
 EEFOUF. THE 
 
 SUB-COMiMITTEE 
 
 OF THE 
 
 BOSTON SUJIOOL BOAKD, 
 
 APPOINTED TO CONSIDER THE SUBJECT 
 OF A REORGANIZATION OF THE BOSTON HIGH SCHOOLS. 
 
 BY W. p. ATKINSON, 
 
 Professor of Englhh Literfffv.re In the Af(f>>S(trJtf/se(t.'^ Iih^tffttfe nf Technologij. 
 
 I " » 1 t 
 
 ( > I > 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 ALFRED MUDGE & SON, CITY PRINTERS, U SCHOOL STREET. 
 
 1870.
 
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 OF 
 
 PROF. W. P. ATKINSON. 
 
 I had the privilege of hearing only the closing remarks, Mr. 
 Chairman, of the young gentleman who has just sat down, and I 
 cannot better begin what I have to say on the subject, than 
 « by giving the feeling which those remarks, so far as I have 
 heard them, occasioned in me. I felt very much as I 
 listened to his argument, as if I were listening to an earnest 
 plea in behalf of the establishment of a manufactory of bows 
 and arrows in these days of Sharp's rifles and six-shooting 
 revolvers. No less preposterous, though I may have misun- 
 derstood him, appears to me to be an argument in this year of 
 our Lord, 1869, in favor of basing the liberal education of 
 the public High School of Boston mainly or wholly upon the 
 study of the dead languages of Greece and Rome. The intrinsic 
 value of those languages in their proper place and time is but a 
 small part of the question before us. The question before us to- 
 night is in regard to the proper course of study for a particular 
 class of schools, not the question of the abstract merit of the 
 classics. My own opinion is that if any instruments of mental 
 culture are preeminently unsuited to the purpose we have in view, 
 that is to say, the mental training of this class of pupils, it is pre- 
 cisely those, the employment of which the young gentleman has 
 been so fei'vently advocating. In my view the reason why our 
 High Schools have to so large an extent failed to meet the wants 
 of the community, has been precisely that heretofore they have de- 
 pended so much on these instrumentalities. The change which
 
 before all others I would advocate, would be, not to drop them 
 entirely from our High School course of study, but to place them 
 where they belong, in a position wholly subordinate to those more 
 important studies required by the majority of the pupils, and the 
 demands of the community and the age in which we live. 
 
 I believe it may safely be affirmed in the first place, that the 
 old plea that the study of the Greek and Roman classics has a 
 certain mysterious disciplinary value for the mind beyond that of 
 any other studies, so that they are to be used as a sort of prelim- 
 inary whetstone to sharpen all boys' wits upon before they can suc- 
 cessfully begin those other studies which are to be at the foundation 
 of their life-work,— I believe that this educational theory may now 
 be ranked among exploded superstitions.* Every study, it is now 
 beginning to be seen, is a mental discipline just so far as it is pur- 
 sued thoroughly and by proper scientific methods ; and it is begin- 
 ning to be seen, further, that the study of the classics themselves, 
 if pursued as they usually are in our schools, by most bungling 
 and unscientific methods, has been furnishing one of the worst 
 systems of mental discipline that ever was devised, when we take 
 into view the mental wants of its recipients, the hundreds of 
 young men who have heretofore received this pretence of a liberal 
 education. Without denying, therefore, that when properly studied 
 the languages of Greece and Rome may furnish the foundation for 
 a liberal education, the two questions we have to ask ourselves 
 are : first, whether as usually studied among us they do furnish a 
 liberal education at all, and secondly, whether, even if studied in 
 better ways and to better purpose, they would furnish the liberal 
 education best suited to the wants of the majority of lads attend- 
 ing the public High Schools of Boston. 
 
 I will pass by the first question with the simple remark that I 
 think that the classical instruction of America, taken at its actual 
 average, and viewed in its actual results, furnishes simply an 
 example of wasted time, and misdirected energy. The average 
 classical education of American boys is shallow, superficial, and 
 
 * See this point well handled in Prof. D'Arcy Thompson's wise and 
 witty little book, "The Day-Dreams of a Schoolmaster."
 
 unsound, for it is merely a cramming to meet the exigencies 
 of a college entrance examination. It is conducted b}' teachers 
 who are not themselves, as a rule, in any sense good classical schol- 
 ars ; it is pursued by the boys with no hearty living interest in 
 their work, but simply under the artificial stimulus of fear of an 
 arbitrary examination ; it is abandoned when that stimulus ceases 
 to act, leaving no fruit of sound or valuable knowledge behind it. 
 The classical education of vast numbers of our college boys is a 
 transparent sham. I should be almost afraid to give my opinion 
 as to the per-cent of real classical scholars who are the only fruit 
 of so much wasted time and opportunity. 
 
 These facts in regard to our so-called classical education are so 
 patent that I imagine they will hardly be disputed. If it were not 
 for that prevalent superstition I just mentioned, that in spite of its 
 uotorious failure in producing real fruit, ihere is yet some sort 
 of mysterious disciplinary value in all this abortive labor, they 
 would long ago have challenged the attention of a community not 
 very tolerant of useless work. Their existence to-day, and the hold 
 the system has upon the community, are a striking evidence of the 
 power of old tradition in maintaining an antiquated method long 
 after it has ceased to have any real efficiency. I think the time is 
 coming when it will appear amazing and almost beyond belief, that 
 in this age and this nation, the only road to admission to our highest 
 seminaries of learning, was through an absolute devotion during 
 six or more of the best years of boyish life to so barren a study 
 of two dead languages of antiquity ; while young men were freely 
 admitted in absolute ignorance, so far as school preparation was 
 concerned or college examination had influence, of everything that 
 constitutes the real knowledge of the nineteenth century. We 
 have a noble language and a noble literature of our own, and they 
 are not examined in these, and consequently arrive at the age of 
 seventeen with a most contemptible and inadequate knowledge of 
 their mother tongue. A vast domain of scientific knowledge has 
 been conquered and annexed to the world's wisdom, since the 
 time when Greek and Latin were almost its sole representatives ; 
 they are not examined in it, and consequently they arrive at the 
 age of seventeen with almost no knowledge of that; so that just
 
 as Gibbon said in his day, that " a finished scholar may emerge 
 from the head of Westminster or Eton, in total ignorance of the 
 business and conversation of English gentlemen in the latter end 
 of the eighteenth century," it may be said of college preparation in 
 our day that a young man may enter an American college at the 
 age of seventeen in almost total ignorance, so far as his school is 
 concerned, of everything which will fit him for the duties of an 
 American citizen in the middle of the nineteenth century. 
 
 If the evil were confined to the small minority of our young 
 men who enter our colleges, it would be bad enough ; but its influ- 
 ence extends far more widely. It perv^erts our whole public school 
 system. Notwithstanding the fact that at any given time it is only 
 a very small percentage of the pupils of one sex in any given 
 High School who are preparing for college, the whole course of study 
 of that High School is adjusted to meet their wants. The best 
 energies of the best teacher are usually consumed in their instruc- 
 tion, and the teacher has been selected with special reference to 
 that work, and being himself the product of the system, is quite 
 unfitted for any other ; so that the waots of the great mass of the 
 pupils are postponed, and their instruction left in inferior hands. 
 If the city is, like your own, large enou'^h to jnaintain two schools, 
 such is the prestige, of the classical course, that a merely English 
 school is looked upon as of quite inferior value, the term liberal is 
 denied it, and the chief function of the school is .supposed to be to 
 furnish boys with a sufficient knowledge of geOj.'Traphy, arithmetic 
 and book-keeping to make good candidates for the counting room. 
 Whatever higher discipline there is, comes exclasivfc^ly in the hard 
 dry form of abstract mathematics. 
 
 This state of things is the more absurd inasmuch as i^e -college 
 boy, though put through this pedantic antiquated drill all through 
 the best years of his boyhood, in order merely to gain admissJon to 
 college, finds after his admission that a modern spirit has penetrated 
 our best colleges. He then has a free choice given him .between 
 classical learning, and the pursuit of many branches of Kvodern 
 science and modern literature ; but when he turns ee-gerly, as the 
 whole spirit of modern life leads him to :turn, to th ose sciences 
 and literatures, he has to sigh in vain for the pre cious ^eajs
 
 of boyhood now gone by, in which he might have laid the 
 proper foundation for such knowledge. He finds himself with 
 senses untrained, with habits of inductive reasoning to be be- 
 gun, ignorant of his mother tongue, with all the foundations yet to 
 be laid. He finds himself a man in years, and a child in English 
 and scientific training. What wonder that he so often goes back 
 in despair to his Latin and Greek vocables of which he does know 
 a little, and thus furnishes, in his disgust at unfamiliar studies, a 
 cheap triumph to the pedant. 
 
 I maintain that from beginning to end, Mr. Chairman, this is 
 all wrong, and that so long as we continue the effort to base a liberal 
 American education solely on the Greek and Latin languages, we 
 shall have the same melancholy failure For the higher American 
 education thus far is a failure, inasmuch as, considered as a system, 
 it produces neither good scholars nor good scientific men. Our good 
 scholars are few and far between, and our men of science and our 
 men of practice are self-educated. The glory of our American 
 system thus far is that it teaches all the people to read and write.* 
 That is a great glory and I would not disparage it ; but the time 
 bas come when we need something more, and I maintain that for 
 the majority of our young people that is absolutely not to be found 
 in the direction of an exclusive study of Latin and Greek, but in 
 .•quite another direction. That we shall still need classical scholars 
 I cheerfully admit. So we shall still need Hebrew and Chaldee 
 amJ Sanskrit scholars. So we shall have, I hope, students of the 
 Eskimo dialects and the languages of New Mexico. But Ameri- 
 can popular education will never be based on the study of 
 Eskimo. As little, in my opinion, can it be based on the study 
 
 * A winter in a recent number of the English Saturday Beview, discussing 
 
 t the subject of English popular education, says : "No one cau have tiie 
 
 • most superficial acquaintance with the mental condition of our large mid- 
 
 ,dle classes, without perceiving a great and widening gulf which separates 
 
 reading from education. Academies and the three Rs have achieved at 
 
 : least the very definite "results" of showing that the outside and merely 
 
 mechanical appliances of education may be brought to a very respectable 
 
 degree of perfection without any corresponding development of intellectual 
 
 :povver." 'A better description could hardly be given of the fatal weakness 
 
 (Sfionr present methods of public school instruction.
 
 6 
 
 of Greek, however wide apart those two hmguages may be in point 
 of absolute value. 
 
 In saying this I am by no means arguing as the advocate of 
 what is called a utilitarian as contradistinguished from a liberal 
 education. I distinctly recognize the existence of an ideal liberal 
 education as the proper aim of all our educational efforts. The 
 question for me is, what constitute the proper ingredients of that 
 ideal liberal education for an American in this nineteenth century ? 
 If we can answer that we shall have a clew to guide us in laying 
 out a course of study for a Boston High School. 
 
 Now in regard to this phrase, liberal education, I \a.y down two 
 principles, — that its essence does not consist in the mere capacity 
 to utter any shibboleth, whether Greek, Latin or Hebrew, but that 
 the essence of liberal education consists in symmetrical mental 
 development. Any course of study that gives that is a liberal 
 course of study ; any course that does not is illiberal ; and so far 
 from its being the peculiar monopoly of any particular course, 
 many courses or sets of studies, mingled in many various propor- 
 tions, can give it — proportions to be varied according to special 
 circumstances and wants and occasions. For, further, I maintain 
 that though a course or method of study may be useful which is 
 not liberal, no course of study can be liberal which is not useful, — 
 useful not in the narrow, but in the high and noble sense of that 
 much-abused word ; and accordingly I find that the most illiberally 
 educated of all men is a classical pedant, for of all men he is the 
 most useless. 
 
 But when we have once admitted this idea of usefulness even 
 into our idea of a liberal education, instead of stigmatizing it as 
 " mere utilitarianism," we have to ask ourselves " useful for 
 what ?" And I answer that the aim of an American education 
 sj'stem should be to make a generation of liberally educated Amer- 
 ican citizens, men and likewise women ; men and women, that is, 
 equipped with the knowledge of the nineteenth century, and not of 
 the ninth ; to act the part of free, intelligent, self-governing human 
 beings, and to do the work which their country and generation 
 set before them. There is no absolute ideal education, good for 
 all times and places. You want a live man or woman as the pro-
 
 duct of your education, not an abstraction, nor a member of an 
 idle cultivated " class." The very idea of a higher education in 
 this country must be something that all can aspire to, though the 
 time may never arrive when all shall reach it. The idea at the 
 foundation of a classical education is an exclusive idea, — it is a 
 class education. Now the theory of our institutions admits of no 
 such idea as that of an idle, or useless, or privileged class. If 
 Greek, therefore, or any other study claims to enter our curriculum, 
 it must be on the ground of some use that it subserves, material 
 or spiritual, and only so far as it subserves such use, and just in 
 proportion to its importance in this point of view must be its pro- 
 portionate weight as an ingredient. 
 
 Is it not plain, therefore, that Greek and Latin as ingredients in 
 the liberal education of literary men and philologists — and I 
 would be the last to underrate the value of such men — is one 
 thing ; Greek and Latin as ingredients in the equally liberal, that 
 is, equally symmetrical, education of a vast majority of well edu- 
 cated men, mnst be quite another thing ? My conception of a liber- 
 ally educated American people, my conception of an educated 
 republic of the future, a republic really educated by institutions of 
 its own growth, the product of its own social organization, not 
 borrowed from Europe or the Middle Ages, must include liberally 
 educated merchants, farmers, manufacturers, mechanics, engineers, 
 and all the rest ; and my conception of their liberal education is, 
 that inasmuch as it embraces the element of usefulness, it makes 
 them good merchants, farmers, mechanics, engineers, just as my 
 conception of a liberally educated philologist or lawyer is, that it 
 makes him a good philologist or a good lawyer ; and that however 
 varied our courses of liberal training may become, they will all agree 
 in this, that they will all equally conduce towards making culti- 
 vated men and women and good citizens. 
 
 If we do not keep such an ideal as this in view in the manage- 
 ment of our public schools, we may as well give up the thought of 
 national education altogether, and leave learning to be still, as 
 heretofore, the monopojy of privileged classes or privileged profes- 
 sions, while the masses shall still content themselves with reading 
 their catechisms. But while privilege, and monopoly, and protec-
 
 8 
 
 lion arc fast passing: away from all other spheres of human activity, 
 and while in England, the very cradle of this exclusive system, they 
 are vanishing as the people advance to power, are we to present the 
 absurd spectacle of a half-educated republic superstitiously cling- 
 ing to the skirts of a system repudiated in the home which gave it 
 birth? 
 
 Looking at the subject from this point of view, when we come to 
 ask ourselves what ought to be the ingredients which should enter 
 into the course of study of Boston High School boys and girls, we 
 must first take a general survey of all studies which can possibly be 
 pursued by boys and girls at the particular period of their education 
 embraced by a High School course, and we must combine these in 
 such proportions as best suit the wants of the classes embraced in 
 these particular schools, and no others. Now, Mr, Chairman, if I 
 were to say briefly that this object might be attained in a rough 
 way b}' exactly inverting the order of studies as at present pursued 
 in the Boston High Schools I think I should not be very far wrong. 
 At present the Boston Latin School is the most prominent, and in 
 its course of study the two subjects Greek and Latin may almost 
 be said to swallow up the rest. English and modern languages, 
 mathematics and science, and the fine arts, are all subordinate, and 
 so subordinate that some of these subjects may practically be said 
 to have no place at all. The whole strength of the most prominent 
 school in the city ma^'^ practically be said to be engaged in prepar- 
 ing a mere handful of boys for the narrow and antiquated college 
 entrance examination, and the course of study of the whole of the 
 school is almost entirely' governed by this paramount consideration. 
 We turn to the other High School for boys, a school which ought 
 equally and in the truest sense to be a school of " liberal" learn- 
 ing, and we find it degraded in public estimation almost to the 
 level of a " Business College." 
 
 Even if I adopted the vulgar and generally received educational 
 theory that there are two distinct styles of education, a " liberal," 
 with classics for a foundation, and a " utilitarian," with arithmetic, 
 book-keeping, etc., as a basis, I still might argue that having regartl 
 to the number of recipients, the latter course would for Boston 
 public school boys outweigh the former in importance a hundred
 
 to one ; and that though it might be incumbent on a wealthy city 
 like Boston to make proper provision for the preparation of a 
 handful of her boys who wish to go to College, yet it is a gross 
 abuse to have the course of study of hundreds of others who never 
 go there bent from its true direction, and the resources of her 
 most expensive school all employed for this subordinate object. 
 Even on the most favorable view, the Boston Latin School as at 
 present organized has a prominence in her system which cannot 
 possibly be justified. For though I should exalt the value of a 
 classical over a utilitarian course of study as extravagantly as the 
 most bigoted advocate of the classics, yet I think even he will not 
 venture to estimate very highly the value of a mere smattering 
 of classical learning, which is all that the majority of the boys 
 even of the Latin School ever get — that majority, I mean, which 
 never reaches college. I say it with all respect to the Head-Mas- 
 ter, of whose own classical learning I have a high appreciation. 
 It is not true in such a case as this, that, as we say, half a loaf is 
 better than no bread. Half a journey, when one never reaches 
 one's destination, is sheer waste of time. The instruction of the 
 Latin School, if it were ever so good of its kind — and I will not 
 enter into that question — is in the main wasted, because it is 
 given to recipients who can make no use of it. It is like equip- 
 ping pedestrians with spurs, or travellers by land with nicely built 
 wherries. 
 
 In putting the case thus I have been assuming the correctness 
 of the distinction made by the advocates of classical studies. But 
 I have myself no faith whatever in the reality of this antithesis 
 between " liberal " and " utilitarian." No course of study deserves 
 for a moment to be called liberal that does not directly serve some 
 noble use ; and on the other hand the most utilitarian of so-called 
 practical studies is not pursued as it should be so long as it is not 
 pursued in truly " liberal " ways. The antithesis is a wholly false 
 and misleading one. 
 
 If we turn from these erroneous popular views and look at the 
 
 subject in the light of a truer theory, we shall find that there is one 
 
 element of a true sj'mmetrical education represented by the present 
 
 classical course and another by the utilitarian course, and that 
 
 2
 
 10 
 
 both are equally necessary to our idea of a good education, and 
 that both suffer by being divorced from one another. Dividing all 
 studies broadly into two divisions, those relating to matter 
 and those relating to mind, physical and metaph3'sical, or by what- 
 ever other terms we distinguish the world without from the world 
 within us, I find that the classical course represents the latter, but 
 represents it at the present day in a wholly antiquated and inad- 
 equate manner. Who would deny for a moment the importance of 
 language-training as a leading factor in any true scheme of edu- 
 cation ? But who at this day can defend the old-fashioned and 
 exclusive teaching of Greek and Latin during the period of 
 boyhood as the true representatives any longer of language- 
 training in a scheme of popular education? They are not 
 any longer even the representatives of our higher philology. 
 With one of the noblest languages that ever existed for our 
 mother-tongue, and with modern languages which are be- 
 coming almost a necessity of every-day life, and with boys, the 
 majority of whom have but scant time to acquire these, why do we 
 persist in wasting some of the best years of their lives in the study 
 of Greek grammar? Why not leave it to the scholars who will 
 make some good use of it, and to the literary men of whose train- 
 ing it forms a proper part ? And on the other hand, why on the 
 plea that Latin is taught in the Latin School, deprive the boys of 
 the English High School of that knowledge of Latin which is neces- 
 sary to them for the right understanding of English ? Grant that 
 a few boys will still need to be crammed to meet the absurd and 
 perverse demands of the present college examination — let them 
 be relegated to a room by themselves and to the hands of a com- 
 petent crammer ; but I do not see why the language-training of 
 the great majority of the Latin School boys should in any material 
 respect differ from the language-training of the English High 
 School boys. Both in my judgment might profitably be taught at 
 least a minimum of Latin ; both should be taught their mother- 
 tongue to some good purpose, though they are not now: both 
 should learn French ; both might profitably learn German in less 
 time than is now wasted on Greek. And all should engage in 
 those ethical studies which belong with language-training. They
 
 11 
 
 should read History and Biography intelligently, not merely be 
 crammed with names and dates ; they should understand the laws 
 and constitution of their country ; they should learn in school the 
 fundamental principles of political economy and social science. 
 All these things are either utterly neglected or most inefficiently 
 taught ; yet we cannot have such a thing as a sound popular 
 education without them. 
 
 If we turn now to the other great division of studies we find 
 that it equally suffers from this unnatural divorce. As Nature 
 herself has interposed an obstacle to the barren study of words 
 by ordaining that before words there shall first come the things 
 words stand for, things material as well as things spiritual, and as it 
 is found that in the natural development of the youthful mind, the 
 study of things material comes before the study of abstractions, and 
 must be its foundation, it follows that the study of the elements of 
 the natural and physical sciences are not specialties to be shut up 
 in a few advanced technical schools, but should form just as much a 
 part of all education as language itself, — nay, that language itself 
 is utterly barren without them, as witness that stultifying study, Eng- 
 lish grammar, as now taught in our primary and grammar schools. 
 But, Mr. Chairman, in spite of this fundamental principle of all good 
 education, what do you suppose would be the result of an exami- 
 nation of the boys now in the Latin School, or of the present fresh- 
 man class in Harvard College, in the elements of natural and phys- 
 ical science ? I think it would be a very melancholy result indeed ; 
 for it is the present practice of our schools to educate candidates 
 for college up to the age of seventeen, without any knowledge ot 
 the world they live in, on the plea that the college does not require 
 it, and they can't spare time from their Greek. And similarly — 
 and here I do not speak without some personal experience — an 
 examination of the graduates of our High Schools generally, as to 
 their knowledge of natural history and natural philosophy as well 
 as in regard to their appreciation of English poetry and English 
 literature, and the amount of it they had really read to any good 
 purpose, would lead to some startling results, and might diminish 
 the loudness of that chorus which is continually rising in praise of 
 the perfection of our public school system.
 
 12 
 
 But I am not satisfied with this twofold division of knowledge 
 into physical and metaphysical. Properly the division is threefold, 
 physical, metaphysical and festhetic ; — Science, Philosophy (includ- 
 ing Philology) and Art. We can have no true symmetrical culture 
 without the recognition of Art as an essential element in all educa- 
 tion that is worthy of the name. Physical science at the present 
 day may be left to maintain her own ground ; she needs no help 
 when all the strongest tendencies of the age are in favor of giving 
 us even an extreme and disproportioned bias in her favor. Our 
 task is only to place the study of physical science in its proper 
 place in our school curriculum, and I would place its beginnings 
 very early. Philosophic studies will never lack support while they 
 furnish such appropriate nutriment to the acuteness of the Yankee 
 mind. Perhaps the strange reverence our people show for the prac- 
 tice of cramming their children with the abstractions of grammar, at 
 an age when they are quite incapable of comprehending them, may 
 be traced as an inheritance from the training — and it was their 
 only philosophic training — which our grandfathers received in the 
 hair-splitting mj'steries of Puritan catechisms. And I am inclined 
 to trace the kindred superstition in favor of employing classical 
 studies as the sole instrument of liberal training to a similar source ; 
 that it was because the dim and faint conceptions of Greek art 
 thus acquired were the only representatives in their education, of 
 {esthetic culture, and the feeling that, spite of all Puritan prejudice, 
 the love of art is an element in human nature. The college boy 
 did hear of Athens, and Pericles and Phidias, did read, though 
 usually to very little purpose, his Homer and his Aeschylus, and did 
 come in contact with perhaps a few minds who had read them with 
 real advantage. This told at least for something — for how little 
 we may know if we ask ourselves what proportion of the graduates 
 of Harvard College, in the past, have studied the Greek classics to 
 such good purpose as really to have entered into the realm of clas- 
 sic art or the spirit of classic poetry.* 
 
 * To attempt to use the nice processes of real classical culture as the 
 chief instrument of popular education is much, it seems to me, as though 
 one were to employ a Eaphael to paint signboards : and hence it comes 
 that the classical education of the one Greek mind in every hundred is
 
 13 
 
 But now that the hatred of Art which sprung from Puritan nar- 
 rowness has so died out that we see the moet puritanic of sects 
 building the costliest of Gothic churches ; when we are beginning to 
 adorn our cities at least with bad monuments and worse statues : 
 and on the other hand free galleries of painting and sculpture are 
 beginning to be collected, to teach us how to make better ; when a 
 love for true music has really begun to develop itself among us ; 
 now that English as well as classic poetry is thought worthy of 
 study, why should not Art be recognized directly as well as indi- 
 rectly in our popular education ? Boston has nobly led the way 
 by making vocal music a fundamental element in the teaching of 
 all her public schools, from the highest to the lowest. I hope to 
 see her take another step, and to see good drawing supplant bad, 
 and the art of drawing recognized as quite as much a necessity 
 and little of a luxury, as the art of writing. There are as many 
 born artists on the benches of the humblest primary schools to-day, 
 as in the most exclusive private schools of the wealthy ; and on 
 the other hand, the art of drawing in its humbler departments 
 should be reckoned as much a necessity for the young mechanic as 
 the art of reckoning.* 
 
 To do these great subjects justice, Mr. Chairman, would be 
 to write a treatise on Education. The main remedy that I 
 would suggest for the defects in the course of study of the 
 Boston High Schools is the breaking down of the wall that 
 separates them. At present the training of the Latin School 
 is narrow and pedantic, and of the English High School cold, 
 hard, and in a low sense utilitarian, simply for want of an 
 ingredient which each might supply the other. It is prepos- 
 terous that the Latin School boys should not be taught science ; 
 
 spoiled, while that of the ulnety-niue others who need something else is 
 perverted ; and the classics are trodden in the mire of a superflcial teach- 
 ing which knows of Greek and Roman Literature nothing but the husk, and 
 of the spirit of Greek Art nothing at all. 
 
 * See on the subject of Art as a factor in Education the wise words of 
 J. S. Mill, in his St. Andrews address ; and see also a book which deserves 
 to be more widely known, "Hiatus, the Void in Modern Education." 
 London : Macmillau, 18G9.
 
 14 
 
 there is no good reason why the English School boys should not 
 feel some of the influence which true classical culture gives. Both 
 should assuredly learn their mother tongue and really know its 
 literature. Both should study modern History and the political 
 and social organization of the world they live in. Both should 
 feel the liberalizing influence of true Art. In both the true 
 period must be found when abstract grammatical studies should be 
 begun, and in my judgment it is a very difierent period from that 
 at which they are begun at present. I think that no boy's language- 
 training will sufier if the abstract study of grammar should be 
 postponed to the age of fourteen. Let him be left till that age to 
 accumulate ideas and to learn language by the right use of it. No 
 language ever yet was learned as early or as well as it might be, 
 which was begun by the abstract study of its grammar. The reason 
 why our children do not learn the use even of their mother tongue 
 and know so little of what is written in it, is because their energies 
 are consumed in a futile attempt to master bad treatises on its 
 grammar in the lower schools ; in precisely the same way that nine- 
 tenths of our college boys are made to hate the ancient classics in 
 the upper ones.* 
 
 If a fusion were thus made of the ingredients of the two school 
 courses, and then if school studies were arra,nged in what 
 all enlightened teachers are beginning to see is the order of 
 nature ; and if at the same time there should be made, as we may 
 perhaps reasonably hope there will, a change in the character of 
 the present college entrance examination, such as will bring it 
 into true harmony with the present improved course of college study, 
 the conflict which now exists between the character and aims of 
 the two schools would almost be done away, and I see not why 
 one institution with broad and liberal aims and liberally organized, 
 with a man at its head of the broadest and most liberal cul- 
 
 * I have heard it remarked by a business man that in nothing were busi- 
 ness men of ability so deficient as in the faculty of expressing their ideas. 
 The remark is very just; but if the teaching of English were propei-ly un- 
 derstood in our public schools there would be no ground for such com- 
 plaint. The English language is precisely what is not taught to any good 
 purpose, and the prevalent classical superstitions are I think responsible in 
 a great measure for the defect.
 
 15 
 
 turc that could anywhere bo found, would not servo a vastly 
 better purpose than two constructed upon the principles of a nar- 
 row and antiquated exclusiveness. The wants of the minority of 
 boys destined for college, or for the other minority destined for a 
 scientific school, need in such a school come into no conflict with 
 those of what must bo always the great majority of pupils ; those, 
 namel}'-, who are to enter the walks of active life without enjoying 
 the privileges of the higher institutions : while their own privileges 
 would be greatly enlarged and their school studies enriched and 
 liberalized by coming in contact, even at school, with all the liber- 
 alizing influences of an institution in which the foundation for 
 higher instruction was being laid by a portion of the pupils. Such a 
 school should be distinctly a scJiool, and should never aim at being 
 a college — for a college filled with boys is of all institutions the 
 most worthless — but it might and would be to boys during the 
 period of boyhood all that the college ought to be to them after- 
 wards in the period of young manhood. I think that boys would 
 not hate such a school. And in such a school courses of study 
 might be formed, with great economy of time and labor, to meet all 
 the varying wants of different classes of recipients. 
 
 The example of Europe is sometimes quoted in favor of speciali- 
 zation, but the educational example of Europe is far more likely to 
 mislead than to guide us. We may safely imitate the thorough- 
 ness of European teaching — I wish we had begun in our schools 
 to have a conception of such thoroughness — but in imitating the 
 form of European institutions we shall, nine cases in ten, be only 
 copying antiquated errors belonging to social systems radically 
 different from our own. The High School education for American 
 boys and girls should be of uniform type and quality, and ought 
 with minor modifications to prepare them equally well for an Amer- 
 ican college or an American scientific school ; or stopping short of 
 that, prepare them really well for active American life. The 
 college and the scientific school themselves should be only the 
 higher classes of the High School. By and by perhaps we shall 
 have a university to crown the whole. 
 
 I know what obstacles exist to the realization of any such scheme 
 as this. On the one hand are the old-world pedantries which still
 
 16 
 
 cling about onr college, but which now that its management is 
 passing more and more into young and energetic hands we may 
 look to see happily removed ; at the other extreme are the lamen- 
 table shortcomings and deficiencies of our primary and grammar 
 schools. No reform in High School teaching can be successful 
 unless it is accompanied by a searching examination into these. 
 But this is not a topic pertinent to this occasion. 
 
 I have thus, Mr. Chairman, indicated, at the risk, perhaps, of 
 seeming to some little better than a Utopian dreamer, some of 
 the directions in which I look to see popular education expand, if 
 we are ever to have a popular education worthy of our age and our 
 nation. Utopian my words may well seem, if we compare them 
 with the present results of our school system. Our school system 
 to-day, when we compare ihe sums lavished upon it, with the ac- 
 tual results it produces, seems to me a monument of wasted power. 
 I know what an inestimable gain it is even to have it. I know 
 that improvement in it must be slow, and must keep pace and can 
 never far outstrip the general progress of the community ; but now 
 it seems to me to lag behind that progress. And it is an encourag- 
 ing sign that as the questions which have so long agitated us, are 
 one by one being set at rest, and the noise of conflict is dying in 
 the distance, the great permanent interest of education, an inter- 
 est on which the very salvation of our free institutions depends, is 
 coming so prominently into the foreground. I trust discussion 
 will not cease till all the shortcomings of our schools have been 
 brought to light, and a remedy found for every evil that afflicts 
 them. And in taking measures for the improvement of the partic- 
 ular schools you are considering, allow me to hope that you will 
 take no step which shall contribute in any degree to the intensify- 
 ing of that foolish and unphilosophical antagonism which is some- 
 times set up between the claims of Science and the claims of 
 Literature, and by so doing give countenance to an illiber- 
 ality which is miscalled " liberal " on the one hand, or to an 
 empiricism which is miscalled " practical " on the other.
 
 I
 
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