GIFT OF 
 
POSSIBLE LIMITATIONS OF THE 
 ELECTIVE SYSTEM. 
 
 X. 
 
 BY G. H. PALMER. 
 
 [REPRINTED FROM THE ANDOVER REVIEW FOR DECEMBER, 1886.] 
 
POSSIBLE LIMITATIONS OF THE ELECTIVE 
 SYSTEM. 
 
 I. 
 
 IN a paper published in tne " Andover Eeview " of November, 
 1885, I called attention to the fact that a new principle is at work 
 in American education. That principle, briefly stated, is this: 
 the student now consciously shares in his own upbuilding. His 
 studies are knitted closely to his personal life. Under this influ- 
 ence a new species of power is developed. Scholarship broadens 
 and deepens, boyishness diminishes, teacher and pupil meet less 
 artificially. The college, as an institution, wins fresh life. Public 
 confidence awakens ; pupils, benefactions, flow in. Over what I 
 wrote an eager controversy has arisen, a controversy which must 
 have proved instructive to those who need instruction most. In 
 the last resort questions of education are decided by educators, as 
 those of sanitation by sanitary engineers ; but in both cases the 
 decision has reference to public needs, and people require to be 
 instructed in the working of appliances which are designed for no 
 other end than their comfort. There is danger that such instruc- 
 tion may not be given. Professional men become absorbed in 
 their art and content themselves with reticence, leaving the public 
 ignorant of the devices by which its health is to be preserved. A 
 great opportunity, therefore, comes to the common householder 
 when these professional men fall foul of one another. In press- 
 ing arguments home they frequently take to ordinary speech, and 
 anybody who then lends an ear learns of the mysteries. The 
 present discussion, I am sure, has brought this informatory gain 
 to every parent who reads the "Andover Review" and has a 
 studious boy. The gain will have been greater because of the 
 candor and courtesy with which the attacking party has delivered 
 
 Copyright, 1886, by HOCGHTON, Mimj* & Co. 
 
 427454 
 
2 :P&$tlile-'l%tflit&liQfts;0f.tlie Elective System. 
 
 its assault. The contest has been earnest. Its issues have been 
 rightly judged momentous. For good or for ill, the choice youth 
 of the land are to be shaped by whatever educational policy 
 finally wins. Yet, so far as I recall, no unkind word has slipped 
 from the pen of one of my stout opponents ; no disparagement of 
 man or college has mixed with the energetic advocacy of principle. 
 The discussion has set in well toward things. I cannot call this 
 remarkable. Of course it is not easy to be fair and strong at 
 once. Sweetness and light are often parted. Yet we rightly 
 expect the scholar's life to civilize him who pursues it, and we 
 anticipate from books a refinement of the spirit and the manners 
 as well as the understanding. M.y opponents have been scholars, 
 and have spoken as scholars speak. It is a pleasure to linger in 
 their kindly contentious company. So I gladly accept the invita- 
 tion of the editors of the " Review " to sum up our discussion and 
 to add some explanatory last words. 
 
 The papers which have appeared fall into two easily distinguish- 
 able classes, the descriptive and the critical. To the former I 
 devote but a brief space, so much more direct is the bearing of the 
 latter on the main topic of debate, the question, namely, what 
 course the higher education can and what it cannot now take. 
 Yet the descriptive papers perform a service and deserve a wel- 
 come word. Suspecting that I was showing off Harvard rather 
 favorably, professors planted elsewhere have attempted to make 
 an equally favorable exhibit of their own colleges. In my mani- 
 festo they have seen "a coveted opportunity to bring forward 
 corresponding statistics which have not been formed under the 
 Harvard method." Perhaps this was to mistake my aim a little. 
 I did intend to advance my college in public esteem ; she de- 
 serves that of me in everything I write. But primarily I 
 thought of myself as the expounder of an important policy, which 
 happens to have been longer perceived and more elaborately 
 studied at Harvard than elsewhere. I hope I did not imply 
 that Harvard, having this excellence, has all others. She has 
 many weaknesses, which should not be shielded from discerning 
 discussion. Nor did I intend to commit the injustice to Harvard 
 an injustice as gross as it is frequent of treating her as a 
 mere embodiment of the elective system. Harvard is a complex 
 and august institution, possessed of all the attractions which can 
 be lent by age, tradition, learning, continually renewed resources, 
 fortunate situation, widespread clientage, enthusiastic loyalty, and 
 forceful guidance. She is the intellectual mother of us all, hon- 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 3 
 
 ored certainly by me, and I believe by thousands of others, for a 
 multiplicity of subtle influences which stretch far outside her 
 special modes of instruction. But for the last half century Har- 
 vard has been developing a new and important policy of educa- 
 tion. Coincident with this development she has attained enormous 
 popular esteem and internal power. The value and limits of this 
 policy, the sources of this esteem and power, I wish everybody, 
 colleges and populace, to scrutinize. To make these things under- 
 stood is to help the higher education everywhere. 
 
 In undertaking this quasi philosophical task, I count it a piece 
 of good fortune to have provoked so many lucid accounts of what 
 other colleges are doing. The more of these the better. The public 
 cannot be too persistently reminded of the distinctive merits of 
 this college and of that. Let each be as zealous as possible ; gains 
 made by one are gains for all. Depreciatory rivalry between col- 
 leges is as silly as it is when religious sects quarrel in the midst of 
 a perishing world. Probably such rivalries have their rise in the 
 dull supposition that a fixed constituency of pupils exists some- 
 where, which if not turned toward one college may be drawn to 
 another. As the old political economists tell of a " wages fund," 
 fixed and constant in each community, so college governors are apt 
 to imagine a public pupil-hoard, not susceptible of much increase 
 or diminution, which may by inadvertence fall into other hands 
 than their own. In reality each college creates its constituency. 
 Its students come, in the main, from the inert mass of the uncol- 
 legiate public. Only one in eight among Harvard students is a 
 son of a Harvard graduate ; and probably the small colleges beget 
 afresh an even larger percentage of their students. On this ac- 
 count the small colleges have been a power in the land. To dis- 
 parage them shall never be my office. In a larger degree than 
 the great universities they spread the college idea among people 
 who would not otherwise possess it. The boy who lives within 
 fifty miles of one of them reflects whether he will or will not have 
 a college training. Were there no college in the neighborhood, 
 he might never consider the matter at all. It is natural enough 
 for undergraduates to decry every college except their own ; but 
 those who love education generously, and who seek to spread it far 
 and wide, cannot afford the luxury of envy. One common danger 
 besetting us all should bind us together. In the allurements of 
 
 k commerce boys may forget that college is calling. They do forget 
 it. According to my computations the number of persons in the 
 New England colleges to-day is about the same as the number in 
 
4 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 the insane asylums; but little more than the number of idiots. 
 Probably this number is not increasing in proportion to popula- 
 tion. Professor Newton, of Oberlin, finds that the increase of 
 students during the ten years between 1870 and 1880, in twenty 
 of our oldest leading colleges, was less than three and a half 
 per cent., the population of the United States increasing during 
 the same period twenty-three per cent. In view of facts like 
 these, careful study of the line along which college growth is still 
 possible becomes a necessity. It will benefit all colleges alike. 
 No one engaged in it has a side to maintain. We are all alike 
 seekers. Whatever instructive experience any college can con- 
 tribute to the common study, and whatever pupils she may thereby 
 gain, will be matter for general rejoicing. 
 
 To such a study the second, or critical, class of papers furnish 
 important stimulus ; for these have not confined themselves to 
 describing institutions : they have gone on to discuss the value and 
 limits of the principle which actuates the new education every- 
 where. In many respects their writers and I are in full accord. 
 In moral aim we always are, and generally, too, in our estimate 
 of the present status. We all confess that the conditions of col- 
 lege education have changed, that the field of knowledge has 
 enlarged, that a liberal training nowadays must fit men for more 
 than the four professions of preaching, teaching, medicine, and 
 law. We agree that the prescribed systems of the past are out- 
 grown. We do not want them. We doubt whether they were 
 well suited to their own time ; we are sure they will never fit 
 ours. Readjustment of curricula, we all declare, must be under- 
 taken if the higher education is to retain its hold on our people. 
 Further still, we agree in the direction of this readjustment. My 
 critics, no less than I, believe that a widely extended scope must 
 be given to individual choice. With the possible exception of 
 Professor Denison, about whose opinion I am uncertain, everybody 
 who has taken part in th$ controversy recognizes the elective prin- 
 ciple as a beneficial one and maintains that in some form or other 
 it has come to stay. People generally are not aware what a con- 
 sensus of opinion on this point late years have brought about. To 
 rid ourselves once for all of further controversy let us weigh well 
 the words of my opponents. 
 
 Mr. Brearley begins his criticism addressed to the New York 
 Harvard Club thus : " We premise that every one accepts the elec- 
 tive principle. Some system based on that principle must be 
 established. No one wants the old required systems back, or any 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 5 
 
 new required system." Professor Howison says : " An elective 
 system, in its proper place, and under its due conditions, is de- 
 monstrably sound." Professor Ladd does not express himself 
 very fully on this point in the " Andover Review," but his opin- 
 ions may be learned from the " New Englander " for January, 
 1885. When, in 1884, Yale College reformed its curriculum and 
 introduced elective studies, it became desirable to instruct the 
 graduates about the reasons for a step which had been long re- 
 sisted. After a brief trial of the new system, Professor Ladd 
 published his impressions of it. I strongly commend his candid 
 paper to the attention of those who still believe the old methods 
 the safer. He asserts that " a perfect and final course of college 
 study is, if not an unattainable ideal, at present an impossible 
 achievement." The considerations which were " the definite and 
 almost compulsory reasons for instituting a comprehensive change " 
 he groups under the following heads : (1) the need of modern lan- 
 guages ; (2) the crowding of studies in the senior year; (3) the 
 heterogeneous and planless character of the total course ; (4) the 
 need of making allowance for the tastes, fhe contemplated pur- 
 suits, and the aptitudes of the individual student. Substantially, 
 these are the evils of prescription which I pointed out ; only, in 
 my view, they are evils not confined to a single year. Stating 
 his observation of the results of election, Professor Ladd says: 
 "Increased willingness in study, and even a new and marked 
 enthusiasm on the part of a considerable number of students, 
 is another effect of the new course already realized. The entire 
 body of students in the upper classes is more attentive, regular, 
 interested, and even eager, than ever before." " More intimate 
 and effective relations are secured in many cases between teachers 
 and pupils." 
 
 These convictions in regard to the efficiency which the elective 
 principle lends to education are not confined to my critics. Let 
 me cite testimony from other leading colleges. The last Amherst 
 Catalogue records (page 24) that " excellent results have appeared 
 from this [the elective] method. The special wants of the student 
 are thus met, his zest and progress in his work are increased, and 
 his association with his teachers becomes thus more close and 
 intimate." President Robinson says, in his annual report for 
 1885 to the Corporation of Brown University : " There are ad- 
 vantages in a carefully guarded system of optional studies not 
 otherwise obtainable. The saving of time in preparing for a 
 special calling in life is something, and the cumulative zeal in 
 
6 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 given lines of study, where a gratified and growing taste is ever 
 beckoning onward, is still more. But above all, some provision 
 for choice among ever-multiplying courses of study has become a 
 necessity." In addressing the American Institute of Instruction 
 at Bar Harbor, on July 7th of the present year, Professor A. S. 
 Hardy, of Dartmouth, is reported as saying : " Every educator 
 now recognizes the fact that individual characteristics are always 
 sufficiently marked to demand his earliest attention ; and. further- 
 more, that there is a stage in the process of education where the 
 choice, the responsibility, and the freedom of the individual should 
 have a wide scope." President Adams, in his inaugural address 
 at Cornell last year, asserted that " there are varieties of gifts, 
 call them, if you will, fundamental differences, that make it im- 
 possible to train successfully all of a group of boys to the same 
 standard. These differences are partly matters of sheer ability, 
 and partly matters of taste ; for if a boy has so great an aversion 
 to a given study that he can never be brought to apply himself to it 
 with some measure of fondness, he is as sure not to succeed in it as 
 he would be if he were lacking the requisite mental capacity." 1 
 
 In determining, then, what the new education may wisely be, 
 let this be considered settled : it must contain a large element of 
 election. That is the opinion of these unbiased judges. They find 
 personal choice necessary for promoting a wider range of topics 
 in the college, a greater zeal on the part of the student, and more 
 suitable relations between teacher and pupil. With this judg- 
 ment I, of course, heartily agree, though I should make more 
 prominent the moral reason of the facts. I should insist that a 
 right character and temper in the receiving mind is always a pre- 
 
 1 These conditions of intellectual nourishment were long ago recognized in 
 other, less formal, departments of mental training. In his essays on Books 
 and Reading President Porter wrote in 1871 : "The person who asks, What 
 shall I read ? or, With what shall I begin ? may have read for years in a me- 
 chanical routine, and with a listless spirit; with scarcely an independent thought, 
 with no plans of self-improvement, and few aspirations for self-culture. To 
 all these classes the advice is full of meaning : ' Read what will satisfy your 
 wants and appease your desires, and you will comply with the first condition to 
 reading with interest and profit.' Hunger and thirst are better than manifold 
 appliances and directions, in respect to other than the bodily wants, towards a 
 good appetite and a healthy digestion. If a man has any self-knowledge or 
 any power of self-direction, he is surely competent to ask himself what is the 
 subject or subjects in respect to which he stands most in need of knowledge or 
 excitement from books. If he can answer this question, he has gone very far 
 towards answering the question, ' What book or books can I read with satisfac- 
 tion and profit ? ' " (Ch. iv., p. 39.) 
 
 I 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 7 
 
 requisite of worthy study. But I misrepresent these gentlemen 
 if I allow their testimony to stop here. They maintain that the 
 elective principle as thus far carried out, though valuable, is still 
 meagre and one-sided. They do not think it will be found self- 
 sufficing and capable of guarding its own working. They see 
 that it has dangers peculiar to itself, and believe that to escape 
 them it will require to be restricted and furnished with supple- 
 mental influences. I believe so too. Choice is important, but it 
 is also important that one should choose well. The individual is 
 sacred, but only so far as he is capable of recognizing the sacred- 
 ness of laws which he has had no part in making. Unrestricted 
 arbitrary choice is indistinguishable from chaos ; and undoubt- 
 edly every method of training which avoids mechanism and in- 
 cludes choice as a factor leaves a door open in the direction of 
 chaos. Infinite Wisdom left that door open when man was created. 
 To dangers from this source I am fully alive. I totally dissent 
 from those advocates of the elective system who would identify it 
 with a laissez faire policy. The cry that we must let nature take 
 care of itself is a familiar one in trade, in art, in medicine, in social 
 relations, in the religious life, in education ; but in the long run it 
 always proves inadequate. Man is a personal spirit, a director, a 
 being fitted to compare and to organize forces, not to take them as 
 they rise, like a creature of nature. The future will certainly not 
 tolerate an education less organic than that of the past ; but just 
 as certainly will it demand that the organic tie shall be a living 
 one, one whose bond may assist those whom it restricts to become 
 spontaneous, forcible, and diverse. If I am offered only the alter- - 
 native of absolutism or laissez faire, I choose laissez faire. Out 
 of chaotic nature beautiful forms do continually proceed. But 
 absolutism kills in the cradle. It cannot tolerate a life that is 
 imperfect, and so it stifles what it should nourish. 
 
 Up to this point my critics and I have walked hand in hand. 
 Henceforth we part company. I shall not follow out all our little 
 divergences. My object from the first has been to trace the line 
 along which the new education may now proceed. It must, it 
 seems, be a line including election ; but election limited how ? To 
 disentangle an answer to this vexed question, I pass by the many 
 points in which my critics have shown that I am foolish, and 
 the few others in which I might show them so, and turn to the 
 fundamental issue between us, our judgment of what the supple- 
 mental influences are which will render personal initiative safe. 
 Personal initiative is assured. The authoritative utterances I have 
 
8 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 just quoted show that it can never again be expelled from Amer- 
 ican colleges. But what checks are compatible with it? Ac- 
 cepting choice, what treatment will render it continually wiser ? 
 Here differences of judgment begin to appear, and here I had 
 hoped to receive much light from my critics. The question is 
 one where cooperative experience is essential. But those who 
 have written against me seem hardly to have realized its impor- 
 tance. They generally confine themselves to showing how bad my 
 plans are, and merely hint at better ones which they themselves 
 might offer. But what are these plans ? Wise ways of training 
 boys are of more consequence than Harvard misdeeds. We want 
 to hear of a constructive policy which can take a young man of 
 nineteen and so train him in self-direction that four years later he 
 may venture out alone into a perplexing, and for the most part 
 hostile, world. The thing to be done is to teach boys how to 
 manage themselves. Admit that the Harvard discipline does not 
 do this perfectly at present ; what will do it better ? Here we 
 are at an educational crisis. We stand with this aim of self- 
 guidance in our hands. What are we going to do with it ? It is 
 as dangerous as a bomb. But we cannot drop it. It is too late 
 to objurgate. It is better to think calmly what possible modes of 
 treatment are still open. When railroads were found dangerous, 
 men did not take to stage-coaches again ; they only studied rail- 
 roading the more. 
 
 Now in the mass of negative criticism which the last year has 
 produced I detect three positive suggestions, three ways in which 
 it is thought limitation may be usefully applied to supplement the 
 inevitable personal initiative. These modes of limitation, it is true, 
 are not worked out with any fullness of practical detail, as if their 
 advocates were convinced that the future was with them. Rather 
 they are thrown out as hints of what might be desirable if facts 
 and the public would not interfere. But as they seem to be the 
 only conceivable modes of restricting the elective principle by any 
 species of outside checkage, I propose to devote the remainder of 
 this paper to an examination of their feasibility. In a subsequent 
 paper I shall indicate what sort of corrective appears to me more 
 likely to prove congruous and lasting. 
 
 The first suggestion is that the elective principle should be 
 limited from beneath. Universities and schools are to advance 
 their grade, so that finally the universities will secure three or four 
 years of purely elective study, while the schools, in addition to 
 their present labors, will take charge of the studies formerly pre- 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 9 
 
 scribed by the college. The schools, in short, are to become Ger- 
 man Gymnasia, and the colleges to delay becoming universities 
 until this regeneration of the schools is accomplished. 1 A certain 
 " sum of topics " is said to be essential to the culture of the man 
 and the citizen. In the interest of church and state, young 
 minds must be provided with certain " fact forms," with a " com- 
 mon consciousness," a " common basis of humanism." Impor- 
 tant as personal election is, to allow it to take place before this 
 common basis is laid is " to strike a blow at the historic substance 
 of civilization." How extensive this common consciousness is to 
 be may be learned from Professor Howison's remark that " lan- 
 guages, classical and modern ; mathematics, in "all its general con- 
 ceptions, thoroughly apprehended; physics, acquired in a similar 
 manner, and the other natural sciences, though with much less of 
 detail ; history and politics ; literature, especially of the mother 
 tongue, but, indispensably, the masterpieces in other languages, 
 particularly the classic ; philosophy, in the thorough elements of 
 psychology, logic, metaphysics, and ethics, each historically 
 treated, and economics, in the history of elementary principles, 
 must all enter into any education that can claim to be liberal." 
 
 The practical objections to this monarchical scheme are many. 
 I call attention to three only. 
 
 In the first place, the argument on which it is based proves too 
 much. If we suppose a common consciousness to be a matter of 
 such importance, and that it cannot be secured except by sameness 
 of studies, then that State is criminally careless which allows 
 ninety-nine hundredths of its members to get an individual con- 
 
 1 In deference to certain writers I employ their favorite term "university " in 
 contrast with the term " college," yet I must own I do not know what it means. 
 An old signification was clear. A university was an assemblage of schools, as 
 our government is an assemblage of States. In England, different corpora- 
 tions, giving substantially similar instruction, are brought together by a com- 
 mon body which confers the degrees. In this country, a group of professional 
 schools law, medicine, theology, and science are associated through one 
 governing body with the college proper, that is, with the candidates for the 
 B. A. degree. In this useful sense, Tufts and Bowdoin are universities ; Am- 
 herst and Brown, colleges. But Germany, which has thrown so many parts of 
 the world into confusion, has introduced exaltation and mystery here. A uni- 
 versity now appears to mean " a college as good as it can be," a stimulating 
 conception, but not a finished or precise one. I would not disparage it. It is 
 a term of aspiration, good to conjure with. When we want to elevate men's 
 ideas, or to obtain their dollars, it is well to talk about creating a true univer- 
 sity: just as it is wise to bid the forward-reaching boy to become "a true 
 gentleman." 
 
10 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 sciousness by the simple expedient of never entering college. The 
 theory seems to demand that every male and why not female ? 
 between sixteen and twenty be indoctrinated in " the essential 
 subject matters," without regard to what he or she may personally 
 need to know or do. This is the plan of the Romish Church, 
 which enforces its " fact forms " of doctrine on all alike ; without 
 securing, however, by this means, according to the judgment 
 of the outside world, any special freshness of religious life. I 
 do not believe the results would be better in the higher secular 
 culture, and I should be sorry to see Romish methods applied 
 there ; but if they are to be applied, let them fall impartially on 
 all members of the community. To put into swaddling clothes 
 the man who is wise enough to seek an education, and to leave 
 his duller brother to kick about as he pleases, seems a little 
 arbitrary. 
 
 But secondly, there is no more prospect of persuading our high 
 schools to accept the prescribed subjects of the colleges than there 
 is of persuading our government to transform itself into the Ger- 
 man. Already the high schools and the colleges are unhappily 
 drawing apart. The only hope of their nearer approach is in the 
 remission by the colleges of some of the more burdensome sub- 
 jects at present exacted. Paid for by common taxation, these 
 schools are called on to equip the common man for his daily 
 struggle. That they will one day devote themselves to laying the 
 foundations of an ideally best education for men of leisure is 
 grotesquely improbable. Although Harvard draws rather more 
 than one third of her students from States outside New England, 
 the whole number of students who have come to her from the 
 high schools of these States, during a period of the last ten 
 years, is but sixty-six. Fitting for college is becoming an alarm- 
 ingly technical matter, and is falling largely into the hands of 
 private tutors and academies. 
 
 It may be said, however, thirdly, that it is just these academies 
 which might advantageously take the present freshman and 
 sophomore studies. They would thus become the exclusive ave- 
 nues to the university of the future, leaving it free to do its own 
 proper work with elective studies. Considering the great ex- 
 pense which this lengthening of the curriculum of the academy 
 implies, it is plain that the number of schools capable of fitting 
 boys in this way would always be small. These few academies, 
 with their monopoly of learned training, would lose their present 
 character and be erected into little colleges, colleges of a second 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 11 
 
 grade. That any such thing is likely to occur, I do not believe ; 
 but if it were, would it aid the higher education and promote 
 its wide dispersion ? Precisely the contrary. Instead of going 
 to the university from these academies, boys would content them- 
 selves with the tolerable education already received. For the 
 most part they would decline to go farther. It is useless to say 
 that this does not happen in Germany, where the numbers resort- 
 ing to the university are so large as to have become the subject 
 of complaint ; for the German government, controlling as it does 
 all access to the profession^, is able to force through the Gymnasia 
 and through special courses at the university a body of young 
 men who would otherwise be seeking their fortunes elsewhere. 
 Whether such control would be desirable in this country, I will 
 not consider. Some questions are not feasible even for discussion. 
 But it is to English experience we must look to see what our case 
 would be. The great public schools of England Eton, Rugby, 
 Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, Cheltenham are of no higher 
 order than under the proposed plan Andover and Exeter would 
 become. From these two academies nearly ninety-five per cent, of 
 the senior classes now enter some college. But of the young men 
 graduating from the English schools named, so far as I can ascer- 
 tain, less than fifty per cent, go to the university. With the greater 
 pressure toward commercial life in this country, the number would 
 certainly be less than in England. To build up colleges of a second 
 grade, and to permit none but those who have passed them to enter 
 colleges of the first, is to cut off the higher education from nearly 
 all those who do not belong to the privileged classes ; it is to make 
 the " common consciousness " less common, and to turn it, even 
 more effectually than at present, into the consciousness of a clique. 
 He who must make a living for himself or for others cannot afford 
 to reach his profession late. The age of entering college is already 
 too high. With improved methods of teaching I hope it may be 
 somewhat reduced. At any rate, every study now added to the 
 high schools or academies is a fresh barrier between education 
 and the people. 
 
 If, then, by prescribing a large amount of study outside the 
 university the elective principle is not likely to be successfully 
 limited, is it not probable that within the college itself the two 
 counter principles of election and prescription, mutually limiting, 
 mutually supporting, will always be retained ? This is the second 
 suggestion ; to bring studies of choice and studies commanded 
 into juxtaposition. The backbone of the college is to be kept 
 
12 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 prescribed, the fleshy parts to be made elective. By a special 
 modification of the plan, the later years are turned largely, per- 
 haps wholly, toward election, and a line is drawn at the junior, or 
 even the sophomore year, below which elective studies are for- 
 bidden to penetrate. Is not this the plan that will finally be 
 judged safest ? It certainly is the safest for a certain number of 
 years. Before it can securely reach anything else, every college 
 must pass through this intermediate state. After half a century 
 of testing election, Harvard still retains some prescribed studies. 
 The Harvard juniors chose for nineteen years before the sopho- 
 mores, and the sophomores seventeen years before the freshmen. 
 In introducing electives a sober pace is commendable. A uni- 
 versity is charged with the greatest of public trusts. The intel- 
 ligence of the community is, to a large extent, in its keeping. It 
 is bound to keep away from risky experiments, to disregard shift- 
 ing popular fancies, and to be as conservative as clearness of sight 
 will permit. I do not plead, therefore, that Harvard and Yale 
 should abolish all prescription the coming year. They certainly 
 should not. In my opinion, most colleges have moved too fast in 
 the elective direction already. I merely plead that we must see 
 where we are going. As public guides, we must forecast the track 
 of the future if we would avoid stumbling into paths which lead 
 nowhere. That is all I am attempting here. I want to ascertain 
 whether the dual system of limitation is a stable system, one in 
 which we can put our trust, or whether it is a temporary conven- 
 ience, likely to slip away a little year after year. What does his- 
 tory say ? Let us examine the facts of the past. The following 
 table shows at the left the fifteen New England colleges. In the 
 next three parallel columns is printed the percentage of elective 
 studies which existed in these colleges in 1875-76 ; in the last 
 three, the percentage which exists to-day. To render the com- 
 parison more exact, I print the sophomore, junior, and senior years 
 separately, reserving the problem of the freshman year for later 
 discussion. 1 
 
 1 It is impossible to show in this table the range of choice, that is, the number 
 of studies between which a man's selection lies. I wish I could warrant minute 
 accuracy in regard to the point which it professes to show. Great pains have 
 been spent upon it. Its statements have been reported to me by an officer of 
 the college named, and this report has been subsequently verified by catalogue. 
 But only those who have had much experience with statistics know how un- 
 veracious figures can be. 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 1875-76. 1885-86. 
 
 13 
 
 
 Soph. 
 
 Juu. 
 
 Sen. 
 
 Soph. 
 
 Jim. 
 
 Sen. 
 
 
 .04 
 
 .20 
 
 .08 
 
 .20 
 
 .75 
 
 .75 
 
 Bates 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Boston 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 .35 
 
 .66 
 
 .82 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 .15 
 
 .25 
 
 .25 
 
 
 
 
 .04 
 
 .04 
 
 .14 
 
 .37 
 
 .55 
 
 Colby . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 .08 
 
 .16 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 .41 
 
 .36 
 
 Harvard. . . 
 
 .50 
 
 .78 
 
 1.00 
 
 100 
 
 1.00 
 
 1.00 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Trinity 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 .25 
 
 .25 
 
 Tufts 
 
 
 
 .17 
 
 .17 
 
 
 
 .28 
 
 .43 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^^esleyan 
 
 
 
 .47 
 
 .47 
 
 .16 
 
 .47 
 
 .64 
 
 Williams 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 .37 
 
 Yale 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 .13 
 
 .53 
 
 .80 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 This table yields four conclusions : (1.) A rapid and fateful 
 revolution is going on in the higher education of New England. 
 We do not exaggerate the change when we speak of an old educa- 
 tion and a new. (2.) The spread of it is in tolerable proportion 
 to the wealth of the college concerned. The new modes are ex- 
 pensive. It is not disapproval which is holding the colleges back ; 
 it is inability to meet the cost. I am sorry to point out this fact. 
 To my mind one of the gravest perplexities of the new education 
 is the query, what are the small colleges to do ? They have a 
 usefulness altogether peculiar; yet from the life-giving modern 
 methods of training they are of necessity largely cut off. (3.) 
 The colleges which long ago foresaw their coming necessities have 
 been able to proceed more cautiously than those which acknowl- 
 edged them late. (4.) The movement is one of steady advance. 
 There is no going back. It must be remembered, too, that the 
 stablest colleges have been proceeding with these changes many 
 more years than the period shown in the table. Are we, then, pre- 
 pared to dismiss prejudice from our minds and to recognize what 
 steadiness of advance means ? In other matters when a general 
 tendency in a given direction is discovered, extending over a long 
 series of years, visible in individuals widely unlike, and present- 
 ing no solitary case of backward turning, we are apt to conclude 
 that there is a force in the movement which will carry it still 
 further onward. We are not disposed to seize on some point in 
 its path and to count that an ultimate holding-ground. This, I 
 say, would be a natural conclusion unless we could detect in the 
 
14 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 movement tendencies at work in an opposite direction. Are there 
 any such tendencies here? I cannot find them. Prescription in- 
 variably loses ; election invariably gains. 
 
 But in order to make a rational prediction about the future we 
 must know more than the bare facts of the past ; we need to 
 know why these particular facts have arisen. What are the 
 reasons that whenever elective and prescribed studies are mixed, 
 an extrusive force regularly appears in the elective ? The reasons 
 are not far to seek. Probably every professor in New England 
 understands them. The two systems are so incongruous that each 
 brings out the vices rather than the virtues of its incompatible 
 brother. Prescribed studies, side by side with elective, appear a 
 bondage; elective, side by side with prescribed, an indulgence. 
 So long as all studies are prescribed, one may be set above another 
 in the mind of the pupil on grounds of intrinsic worth ; let cer- 
 tain studies express the pupil's wishes, and almost certainly the 
 remainder, valuable as they may be in themselves, will express his 
 disesteem. It is useless to say this should not be so. It always is. 
 The zeal of work, the freshness of interest, which now appear in 
 the chosen studies, are deducted from those which are forced. On 
 the latter as little labor as possible is expended. They become 
 perfunctory and mechanical, and soon restive pupils and dis- 
 satisfied teachers call for fresh extension of energizing choice. 
 This is why the younger officers in all the colleges are eager to 
 give increased scope to the elective studies. They cannot any 
 longer get first-rate work done in the prescribed. Alarmed by 
 the dangers of the new principle, as they often and justly are, 
 they find that the presence of prescription, instead of diminishing 
 the dangers, adds another and a peculiarly enfeebling one to those 
 which existed before. So certain are these dangers, and so inevita- 
 ble the expanding power of the elective principle, that it is question- 
 able whether it would not be wiser for a college to refuse to have 
 anything to do with elective studies so soon as it knows itself too 
 weak to allow them to spread. 
 
 For where will this spreading stop? It cannot stop till the 
 causes of it stop. The table just given shows no likelihood of its 
 stopping at all, and a little reflection will show that each enlarge- 
 ment increases the reasons for another enlargement still. If pre- 
 scribed studies are ever exceptional, ineffective, and obnoxious, 
 they certainly become more so as they diminish in number. A 
 college which retains one of them is in a condition of unstable 
 equilibrium. But is this true of the freshman year ? Will not a 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 15 
 
 special class of considerations keep prescription enduring and in- 
 fluential there, long after it has lost its usefulness in the later 
 years ? A boy of nineteen comes from home about as untrained 
 in will as in intelligence. Will it not always be thought best to 
 give him a year in which to acquaint himself with his surround- 
 ings and to learn what studies he may afterwards profitably select ? 
 Possibly it will. I incline to think not. The case of the fresh- 
 man year is undoubtedly peculiar. Taking a large body of col- 
 leges, we have direct evidence that during their last three years 
 the elective principle steadily wins and never loses. We have but 
 a trifle of such evidence as regards the freshman year. There the 
 struggle of the two forces has barely begun. It has begun at 
 Harvard, and the usual result is already foreshadowed. The pre- 
 scribed studies are disparaged studies ; they are not worked at the 
 best advantage. Still, I do not like to prophesy on evidence so 
 narrow. I will merely say I see no reason to suppose that colleges 
 will meet with permanent success in mingling incompatible kinds 
 of study in their freshman year. But I can only surmise. Let 
 any college that inclines to try the experiment do so. 
 
 It may be thought, however, a wiser course to keep the fresh- 
 man year untouched by choice. A solid year of prescription is 
 thus secured as a limitation on the election that is to follow. This 
 plan is so often advised, especially by persons unacquainted with 
 the practical working of colleges, that it requires a brief exami- 
 nation by itself. 
 
 Let us suppose the revolution which we have traced in the 
 sophomore, junior, and senior years to have reached its natural 
 terminus ; let us suppose that in these years all studies have be- 
 come elective, while the freshman year remains completely pre- 
 scribed ; the college will then fall into two parts, a preparatory 
 department and a university department. In these two depart- 
 ments the character of the instruction, the methods of study, the 
 consciousness of the students, will be altogether dissimilar. The 
 freshmen will not be taken by upper classmen as companions ; 
 they will be looked down upon as children. Hazing will find 
 abundant excuse. An abrupt line will be drawn, on whose far- 
 ther side freedom will lie, on whose hither side, bondage. The 
 sophomore, a being who at best has his peculiarities, will find 
 his sense of self-sufficiency doubled. Whatever badly-bred boy 
 parents incline to send to college will seem to them safe enough 
 for a year, and they will suppose that during this period he will 
 learn how to behave. Of course he will learn nothing of the sort. 
 
16 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 Manly discipline has not yet begun. At the end of the freshman 
 year a boy will be only so much less a boy as increase of age may 
 make him. Through being forced to study mathematics this year 
 there comes no sustaining influence fitted to fortify the judgment 
 when one is called the next year to choose between Greek and 
 German. On the contrary, the change from school methods to 
 maturing methods is rendered as dangerous as possible by allow- 
 ing it to take place quite nakedly, by itself, unsupported by other 
 changes, and at the mere dictation of the almanac. An emanci- 
 pation so bare and sudden is not usual elsewhere. For boys who 
 do not go to college, departure from home is commonly recog- 
 nized as a fit occasion for putting on that dangerous garment, the 
 toga virilis. Entrance to the university constitutes a similar 
 epoch, when change of residence, new companions, altered con- 
 ditions of living, a realization that the old supports are gone, 
 and the presumption with which every one now meets the youth 
 that he is to be treated as a man among men, become helpful in- 
 fluences cooperating to ease the hard and inevitable transition 
 from parental control to personal self -direction. A safer time 
 for beginning individual responsibility cannot be found. At any 
 rate, whether my diagnosis of reasons is correct or not, the fact is 
 clear, self-respecting colleges do not tolerate preparatory de- 
 partments. They dp not work well. They are an element of 
 weakness in the institution which harbors them. Even where at 
 first they are judged necessary, so soon as the college grows strong 
 they are dropped. When we attempt to plan an education for 
 times to come, we must bear in mind established facts. Turn the 
 freshman year into a preparatory department, fill it with studies 
 antithetic in aim, method, and spirit to those of later years, and 
 something is established which no sober college has ever permitted 
 to remain long within its borders. This is the teaching of the past 
 without an exception. To suppose the future will be different is 
 but the blind hope of a timid transitionalism. 
 
 The third suggestion for restricting election is the group sys- 
 tem. This deserves a more respectful treatment than the methods 
 hitherto discussed, for it is something more than a suggestion : it 
 is a system, a constructive plan of education, thought out in all 
 its parts, and directed toward an intended end. The definition 
 which I have elsewhere offered of the elective system, that it de- 
 mands a fixed quantity and quality of study with variable topic, 
 would be applicable also to the group system. Accordingly it be- 
 longs to the new education rather than to the old. No less than 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 17 
 
 the elective system it is opposed to the methods of restriction thus 
 far described. These latter methods attempt to limit election by 
 the ballast of an alien principle lodged beneath it or by its side. 
 They put a weight of prescription into the preparatory schools, 
 into the early college years, or into parallel lines of study extend- 
 ing throughout the college course. The source of their prac- \ 
 tical trouble lies here : the two principles election and prescrip- I'" 
 tion are nowhere united ; they remain sundered and at war, J 
 unserviceable for each other's defects. The group system inter- 
 twines them. It permits choice in everything, but at the same 
 time prescribes everything. This it effects by enlarging the unit 
 of choice and prescribing its constituent factors. A group or 
 block of studies is offered for choice, not a single study. All the 
 studies of a group must be taken if any are, the " if " being the 
 only matter left for the student to settle. The group may include 
 all the studies open to a student at the university. One decision 
 may determine his entire course. Or, as in the somewhat anal- 
 ogous arrangement of the English universities, one group may be 
 selected at the beginning and another in the middle of the univer- 
 sity life. The group itself is sometimes contrived so as to allow 
 an individual variation ; different students read different books ; 
 a special phase of philosophy, history, or science receives promi- 
 nence. But the boundaries of the group cannot be crossed. All 
 the studies selected by the college authorities to form a single 
 group must be taken ; no others can be. 
 
 In this method of limiting choice there is much that is attrac- 
 tive. I feel that attraction strongly. Under the exceptional con- 
 ditions which exist at Johns Hopkins University, a group system 
 has done excellent work. Like all the rest of the world, I honor 
 that work and admire its wise directors. But group systems 
 seem to me to possess features too objectionable to permit them 
 to become the prevalent type of the future, and I do not see 
 how these features can be removed without abandoning what is 
 distinctive, and changing the whole plan into the elective system, 
 pure and simple. The objectionable features connect themselves 
 with the size of the unit of choice, with difficulties in the con- 
 struction of the groups, and with the attempt to enforce specializa- 
 tion. But these are enigmatic phrases ; let me explain them. 
 
 Obviously, for the young, foresight is a hard matter. While 
 disciplining them in the intricate art of looking ahead, I should 
 think it wise to furnish frequently a means of repairing errors. 
 Penalties for bad choices should not be too severe. Now plainly 
 
 VOL. vi. NO. 36. 38 
 
18 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 the larger the unit of choice, the graver the consequences of 
 erroneous judgment. The group system takes a large unit, a 
 body of studies; the simple elective system, a small unit, the 
 single study. Errors of choice are consequently less reparable 
 under the group system than under pure election. To meet 
 this difficulty the college course at Baltimore has been reduced 
 from four years to three ; but even so, a student who selects a 
 group for which he finds himself unfit cannot bring himself into 
 proper adjustment without the loss of a year. If he does not dis- 
 cover his unfitness until the second year has begun, he loses two 
 years. Under the elective system, the largest possible penalty for 
 a single mistake is the loss of a single study, one quarter of a 
 year's work. This necessary difference in ease of reparability ap- 
 pears to me to mark an inferiority in group systems, considered as 
 methods of educating choice. To the public it may seem other- 
 wise. I am often astonished to find people approving irreparable 
 choices and condemning reparable ones. That youths between 
 nineteen and twenty-three should select studies for themselves 
 shocks many people who look kindly enough on marriages con- 
 tracted during those years. Boys still unbearded have a large 
 share in deciding whether they will go to college, to a scientific 
 school, to a store, to sea, or to a cattle-ranch. Their lives are 
 staked on the wisdom of the step taken. Yet the American mode 
 of meeting these family problems seems to our community, on the 
 whole, safer than the English way of regulating them by tradition 
 and dictation. The choice with heavy stakes of the boy who does 
 not go to college is frequently set off favorably against the choices 
 with light stakes of the boy who goes. Perhaps a similarly lenient 
 judgment will in the long run be passed on the great stakes in- 
 volved in group systems. I doubt it. I think it will ultimately 
 be judged less dangerous and more maturing to grant a young 
 man, in his passage through a period of moral discipline, frequent 
 opportunities of repair. 
 
 Again, the practical difficulties of deciding what groups shall be 
 formed are enormous. What studies shall enter into each ? How 
 many groups shall there be? If but one, we have the old-fash- 
 ioned college with no election. If two, we have the plan which 
 Yale has just abandoned, a fixed undergraduate department main- 
 tained in parallel vigor with a fixed scientific school. But in con- 
 ceding the claims of variety even to this degree, we have treated 
 the fundamental differences between man and man as worthy, not 
 reprehensible ; and can we say that the proper differences are only 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 19 
 
 two ? Must we not acknowledge a world at least as complex as 
 that they have in Baltimore, where there appear to be seven repu- 
 table species of mankind : " those who wish a good classical train- 
 ing; those who look toward a course in medicine; those who 
 prefer mathematical studies with reference to engineering, astron- 
 omy, and teaching ; those who wish an education in scientific 
 studies, not having chosen a specialty ; those who expect to pur- 
 sue a course in theology ; those who propose to study law ; those 
 who wish a literary training not rigidly classical." 1 Here a clas- 
 sification of human wishes is attempted, but one suspects that 
 there are legitimate wishes which lie outside the scheme. It does 
 not, for example, at once appear why a prospective chemist should 
 be debarred from all regular study of mathematics, or a prospective 
 lawyer from Latin. It seems hard that a youth of literary tastes 
 should be cut off from Greek at entrance unless he will agree to 
 take five exercises in it each week throughout his college course. 
 One does not feel quite easy in allowing nobody but a lawyer or a 
 devotee of modern languages to read a page of English or Amer- 
 ican history. 2 The Johns Hopkins programme is the most in- 
 genious and the most flexible contrivance for working a group 
 system that I have ever seen. For this reason I mention it as the 
 most favorable type of all. Considering its purposes, I do not 
 believe it can be much improved. As applied to its little band of 
 students 116 it certainly works few hardships. Yet all the 
 exclusions I have named, and many more besides, appear in it. I 
 instance these simply to show what barriers to knowledge the best 
 group system erects. Remove these, and others quite as great are 
 introduced. Try to avoid them by allowing the student of one 
 group to take certain studies in another, and the sole line which 
 parts the group system from the elective is abandoned. In prac- 
 tice, it usually is abandoned. Confronted with the exigencies of 
 operation, the so-called group system turns into an elective sys- 
 tem, with highly specialized lines of study strongly recommended. 
 With this more genial working I have nothing now to do. My 
 point is this : a system of hard and fast groups presents difficulties 
 of construction and maintenance too great to recommend it to the 
 average college of the future as the best mode of limiting the 
 elective principle. 
 
 Probably, however, this difficulty will be chiefly felt by persons 
 engaged in the actual work of educational organization. It will 
 
 1 Andover Review, June, 1886, p. 572. 
 
 2 See the Johns Hopkins University Register, pp. 47-53. 
 
20 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 not be observed by the " walking delegate," who from a position 
 in the outer world tells college people from time to time what 
 they had better do. That gentleman will find the objection more 
 serious that grouped colleges are in reality professional schools 
 carried down to the limits of boyhood. So far as they hold 
 by their groups, they are nurseries of specialization. That this 
 is necessarily so may not at first be apparent. A little con- 
 sideration of the contrast in aim between group systems and pre- 
 scribed will make the matter plain. Prescribed systems have 
 gained their long hold on popular confidence by aiming at har- 
 monious culture. They argue, justly enough, that each separate 
 sort of knowledge furnishes something of its own to the making 
 of a man. This particular " something," they say, can be had 
 from no other source. The sum of these "somethings " constitutes 
 a rounded whole. The man who has not experienced each of 
 them in some degree, however small, is imperfectly planned. 
 One who has been touched by all has laid the foundations of a 
 liberal education. Degree of acquaintance with this subject or 
 with that may subsequently enlarge. Scholarly interest may con- 
 centrate. But at the first, the proper aim is balanced knowledge, 
 harmonious development of all essential powers, avoidance of one- 
 sidedness. 
 
 On this aim the group system bestows but a secondary atten- 
 tion. Eegarding primarily studies, not men, it attempts to organ- 
 ize single connected departments of knowledge. Accordingly it 
 permits only those studies to be pursued together which imme- 
 diately cohere. It lays out five, ten, any number of paths through 
 the field of knowledge, and to one of these paths the pilgrim is 
 confined. Each group constitutes a specialty, a specialty inten- 
 sified in character as, in order to escape the difficulties of main- 
 tenance just pointed out, the number of groups is allowed to 
 increase. By insistence on specialization regard for general cul- 
 ture is driven into a subordinate place. The advocates of pre- 
 scription maintain that there are not half a dozen ground-plans 
 of perfected humanity. They say there is but one. If we intro- 
 duce variety of design into a curriculum, we neglect that ideal 
 man who resides alike in all. We trust, on the contrary, in our 
 power to hit some line of study which may deservedly appeal to 
 one human being while not so appealing to another. We simply 
 note the studies which are most congruous with the special line 
 selected, and by this congruity we shape our group. In the new 
 aim, congruity of studies takes precedence of harmonious develop- 
 ment of powers. 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 21 
 
 I have no doubt that specialization is destined to become more 
 marked in the American education of the future. It must be- 
 come so if we are to produce the strong departmental scholars 
 who illuminate learning in other countries ; indeed, it must become 
 so if we are to train competent experts for the affairs of daily life. 
 The popular distrust of specializing is sure to grow less as our 
 people become familiar with its effects and see how often narrow 
 and thorough study, undertaken in early life, leads to ultimate 
 breadth. It is a pretty dream that a man may start broad and 
 then concentrate, but nine out of every ten strong men have taken 
 the opposite course. They have begun in some one-sided way, 
 and have added other sides as occasion required. Almost in his 
 teens Shakespeare makes a specialty of the theatre, Napoleon of 
 military science, Beethoven of music, Hunter of medicine, Hugh 
 Miller of rocks, Faraday of chemistry, Hamilton of political sci- 
 ence. The great body of painters, musicians, poets, novelists, 
 theologians, politicians, are early specialists. In fact, self-made 
 men are generally specialists. Something has aroused an interest, 
 and they have followed it out until they have surveyed a wide 
 horizon from a single point of view. In offering wider oppor- 
 tunities for specialization, colleges have merely been assimilating 
 their own modes of training to those which prevail in the world 
 at large. 
 
 It does not, therefore, seem to me objectionable that group sys- 
 tems set a high value on specialization. That is what every man 
 does, and every clear-eyed college must do it too. What I object 
 to is that group systems, so far as they adhere to their aim, en- 
 force specialization. Among every half dozen students, probably 
 one will be injured if he cannot specialize largely; two or three 
 more might wisely specialize in lower degree. But to force the 
 remaining two or three into curricula shaped by professional bias 
 is to do them serious damage. There are sober boys of little in- 
 trepidity or positive taste, boys who properly enough wish to know 
 what others know. They will not make scholars. They were not 
 born to enlarge the boundaries of knowledge. They have another 
 function : they preserve and distribute such knowledge as already 
 exists. Many of them are persons of wealth. To furnish them 
 glimpses of varied learning is to save them from barbarism. 
 Still another large class is composed of boys who develop late. 
 They are boys who will one day acquire an interest of their own, 
 if they are allowed to roam about somewhat aimlessly in the 
 domain of wisdom until they are twenty-one. Both of these 
 
22 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 classes have their rights. The prescribed system was built to sup- 
 port them ; the elective shelters and improves them ; but a group 
 system shuts them all out, if they will not on leaving school adopt 
 professional courses. Whenever I can hear of a group system 
 which like the old college has a place for the indistinct young 
 man, and like the new elective college matures him annually by 
 suggesting that he take part in shaping his own career, I will ac- 
 cept the group system. Then, too, the public will probably accept 
 it. Until then, rigid groups will be thought by many to lay too 
 great a strain on unseasoned powers of choice, to present too many 
 practical difficulties of construction, and to show too doctrinaire a 
 confidence that every youth will fit without pinching into a special- 
 ized class. 
 
 G. H. Palmer. 
 CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 
 
POSSIBLE LIMITATIONS OF THE 
 ELECTIVE SYSTEM. 
 
 n. 
 
 BY G. H. PALMEE. 
 
 [REPRINTED PROM THE ANDOVER REVIEW FOR JANUARY, 1887.] 
 
POSSIBLE LIMITATIONS OF THE ELECTIVE 
 SYSTEM. 1 
 
 II. 
 
 THE preceding paper has sufficiently discussed the impossible 
 limitations of the elective system, and has shown with some mi- 
 nuteness the grounds of their impossibility. The methods there 
 examined are the only ones suggested by my critics. They all 
 agree in this, that they seek to narrow the scope of choice. They 
 try to combine with it a hostile factor, and they differ merely in 
 their mode of combination. The first puts a restraining check be- 
 fore election ; the second puts one by its side ; the third makes the 
 two inseparable by allowing nothing to be chosen which is not first 
 prescribed. The general purpose of all these methods is mine 
 - also. Election must be limited. Unchartered choice is licentious 
 and self-destructive. I quarrel with them only because the modes 
 of effecting their purpose tend to produce results of a transient and 
 inappropriate sort. The aim of education, as I conceive it, is to 
 spiritualize the largest possible number of persons, that is, to teach 
 them how to do their own thinking and willing, and to do it well. 
 But these methods effect something widely different. They either 
 aristocratize where they should democratize, or they belittle where 
 they should mature, or else they professionalize where they should 
 humanize. A common trouble besets them all : the limiting au- 
 thority is placed in external and arbitrary juxtaposition to the 
 personal initiative which it professes to support. It should grow 
 out of this initiative and be its interpreter and realization. By 
 limitation of choice the proposers of these schemes appear to mean 
 
 1 This article closes the discussion introduced by Professor Palmer in the 
 November number (1885) of the Review, and is the final answer of the author 
 to his critics. ED. 
 
 Copyright, 1887, by HOUQHTON, MOTLIN & Co. 
 
2 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 making choice less. I mean fortifying it, keeping it true to itself, 
 making it more. Control that diminishes the quantity of choice 
 is one thing ; control that raises the quality, quite another. How 
 important is this distinction and how frequently it is forgotten ! 
 Words like "limitation," "control," "authority," "obedience," 
 are words of majesty, but words also of doubtful import. They 
 carry a freight of wisdom or of folly, according to the end to- 
 wards which they steer. In order to sanction or discard limita- 
 tions which induce obedience, we must bear that end in mind. 
 Let us stop a moment, and see that we have it in mind now. 
 
 Old educational systems are often said to have erred by excess 
 of authority. I could not say so. The elective system, if it is to 
 possess the future, must become as authoritative as they. More ac- 
 curately we say that their authority was of a wrong sort. A father 
 may exercise an authority over his child no less directive than that 
 of the master over the slave ; but the father is trying to accomplish 
 something which the master disregards ; the father hopes to make 
 the will of another strong, the master to make it weak ; the father 
 commands what the child himself would wish, had he sufficient 
 experience. The child's obedience accordingly enlightens, steadies, 
 invigorates his independent will. Invigoration is the purpose of 
 the command. The authority is akin secretly akin to the 
 child's own desires. No alien power intervenes, as when a slave 
 obeys. Here a foreign will thwarts the slave's proper motions. 
 Over against his own legitimate desires, the desire of a totally 
 different being appears and claims precedence. Obedience like 
 this brings no ennoblement. The oftener a child obeys, the less 
 of a child is he ; the oftener a slave, the more completely he is 
 a slave. Roughly to say, then, that submission to authority is 
 healthy for a college boy argues a mental confusion. There are 
 two kinds of authority, the authority of moral guidance, and the * 
 authority of repressive control ; parental authority, respecting and 
 vivifying the individual life and thus continually tending to su- 
 persede itself, and masterly authority, whose command, out of 
 relation to the obeyer's wish, tends ever to bring the obedient into 
 bondage. Which shall college authority be ? Authority is nec- 
 essary, ever-present authority. If the young man's choice is to 
 become a thing of worth, it must be encompassed with limitations. 
 But as the need of these limitations springs from the imperfections 
 of choice, so should their aim be to perfect choice, not to repress it. 
 To impose limitations which do not ultimately enlarge the youth 
 they bind is to make the means of education " oblige against its 
 main end." 
 
Q1I 
 
 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 3 
 
 This moral authority is what the new education seeks. To a 
 casual eye, the colleges of to-day seem to be growing disorganized ; 
 a closer view shows construction taking place, but taking place 
 along the lines of the vital distinction just pointed out. Men are 
 striving to bring about a germane and ethical authority in the 
 room of the baser mechanical authorities of the past. Here, then, 
 is a clue which, if followed up, will lead us away from impossi- 
 ble limitations of the elective system, and conduct us at length to 
 the possible, nay, to the inevitable ones. As the elective principle 
 is essentially ethical, its limitations, if helpfully congruous, must 
 be ethical too. They must be simply the means of bringing home 
 to the young chooser the sacred conditions of choice, which condi- 
 tions, if I rightly understand them, may compactly be entitled those 
 of intentionality, information, and persistence. To secure these 
 conditions, limitations exist. In the very nature of choice, such 
 conditions are implied. Choice is sound as they prevail, whimsi- 
 cal as they diminish. An education which lays stress on the elec- 
 tive principle is bound to lay stress on these conditions also. It 
 cannot slip over into lazy ways of letting its students drift, and 
 still look for credit as an elective system. People will distrust it. 
 That is why they distrust Harvard to-day. The objections brought 
 against the elective system of Harvard are in reality not leveled 
 against the elective system at all. They are directed against its 
 bastard brother, laissez-faire. Objectors suspect that the condi- 
 tions of choice which I have named are not fulfilled. They are 
 not fulfilled, I confess, or rather I stoutly maintain. To come any- 
 where near fulfilling them requires long time and study, and action 
 unmpeded by a misconceiving community. Both time and study 
 Harvard has given, has given largely. The records of scholar- 
 ship and deportment which I exhibited a year ago show in how 
 high a degree Harvard has already reached those conditions which 
 remove from choice the capricious, ignorant, and unsteadfast char- 
 acteristics which rightly bring it into disrepute. But much re- 
 mains to do, and in that doing we are hampered by the fact that 
 a portion of the public is still looking in wrong directions. It 
 cannot get over its hankering after the delusive modes of limita- 
 tion which I have discussed. It does not persistently see that at 
 present the proper work of education is the study of means by 
 which self-direction may be rendered safe. Leaders of education 
 themselves see this but dimly, as the papers of my critics naively 
 show. Until choice was frankly accepted as the fit basis for the 
 direction of a person by a person, its fortifying limitations could 
 
4 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 not be studied. Now they must be studied, now that the old meth- 
 ods of autocratic control are breaking down. As a moral will 
 comes to be recognized as the best sort of steam power, the modes 
 of generating that power acquire new claims to attention. Hence- 
 forth the training of the will must be undertaken by the elective 
 system as an integral part of its discipline. 
 
 I am not so presumptuous as to attempt to prophesy the pre- 
 cise forms which methods of moral guidance will ultimately take. 
 Moral guidance is a delicate affair. Its spirit is more important 
 than its procedure. Flexibility is its strength. Methods final, 
 rigid, and minute do not belong to it. Nor can it afford to forget 
 the one great truth of laissez-faire, that wills which are to be kept 
 fresh and vigorous will not bear much looking after. Time, too, 
 is an important factor in the shaping of moral influences. Ex- 
 periments now in progress at Harvard and elsewhere must dis- 
 criminate safe from unsafe limitations. Leaving then to the 
 future the task of showing how wide the scope of maturing disci- 
 pline may become, I will merely try to sketch the main lines 
 along which experiments are now proceeding, I will give a few 
 illustrative examples of what is being done and why, and I will 
 state somewhat at large how, in my judgment, more is yet to be 
 accomplished. To make the matter clear a free exposition shall 
 be given of the puzzling headings already named ; that is, I will 
 first ramblingly discuss the limitations on choice which may deepen 
 the student's intentionality of aim ; secondly, those which increase 
 his information in regard to means ; and thirdly, those which may 
 strengthen his persistence in a course once chosen. 
 
 That intentionality should be cultivated, I need not spend many 
 words in explaining. All acknowledge that without a certain 
 degree of it choice is impossible. Many assert also that boys come 
 to college with no clear intentions, not knowing what they want, 
 waiting to be told ; for such, it is said, an elective system is mani- 
 festly absurd. I admit the fact. It is true. The majority of the 
 freshmen whom I have known in the last seventeen years have 
 been, at entrance, deficient in serious aims. But from this fact I 
 draw a conclusion quite opposite to the one suggested. It is elec- 
 tion, systematized election, which these boys need. For when we 
 say a young student has no definite aims, we imply that he has 
 never become sufficiently interested in any given intellectual line 
 to have acquired the wish to follow that line farther. Such a state 
 of things is lamentable, and certainly shows that prescribed meth- 
 ods the proper methods, in my judgment, for the school years 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 5 
 
 have proved inadequate. It is useless to continue them into 
 years confessedly less suited to their exercise. Perhaps it is about 
 equally useless to abandon the ill-formed boy to unguided choice. 
 Prescription says, " This person is unfit to choose, keep him so ; " 
 laissez-faire says, " If he is unfit to choose, let him perish ; " but 
 a watchful elective system must say, " Granting him to be unfit, 
 if he is not spoiled, I will fit him." And can we fit him ? I 
 know well enough that indifferent teachers incline to shirk the 
 task. They like to divide pupils into the deceptive classes of 
 good and bad, meaning by the former those who intend to work, 
 and by the latter those who intend not to. But we must get rid 
 of indifferent teachers. Teachers with enthusiasm in them soon 
 discover that the two classes of pupils I have named may as well 
 be dismissed from consideration. Where aims have become defi- 
 nite, a teacher has little more to do. The boy who means to work 
 will get learning under the poorest teacher and the worst system ; 
 while the boy who means not to work may be forced up to the Pie- 
 rian spring, but will hardly be made to drink. A vigorous teacher 
 does not assume intention to be ready-made. He counts it his 
 continual office to help in making it. On the middle two quarters 
 of a class he spends his hardest efforts, on students who are friendly 
 to learning but not impassioned for it, on those who like the re- 
 sults of study but like tennis also, and popularity, and cigars, and 
 slackness. The culture of these weak wills is the problem of 
 every college. Here are unintentional boys waiting to be turned 
 into intentional men. What limitations on intellectual and moral 
 vagrancy will help them forward ? 
 
 The chief limitation, the one underlying all others, the one 
 which no clever contrivance can ever supersede, is vitalized teach- 
 ing. Suitable subjects, attractively taught, awake lethargic inten- 
 tion as nothing else can. An elective system, as even its enemies 
 confess, enormously stimulates the zeal of teachers. It conse- 
 quently brings to bear on unawakened boys influences of a 
 strangely quickening character. When I hear a man trained 
 under the old methods of prescription say, " At the time I was in 
 college I could not have chosen studies for myself, and I do not 
 believe my son can," I see, and am not surprised to see, that he 
 does not understand what forces the elective system sets astir. 
 So powerful an influence have these forces over both teachers and 
 pupils, that questions of hard and easy studies do not, as outsiders 
 are apt to suppose, seriously disturb the formation of sound inten- 
 tions. The many leaders in education whose opinions on election 
 
6 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 I quoted in my previous paper agree that the new modes tend to 
 sobriety and intentionality of aim. When Professor Ladd speaks 
 of " the unexpected wisdom and manliness of the choices already 
 made " in the first year of election at New Haven, he well ex- 
 presses the gratified surprise which every one experiences on per- 
 ceiving for the first time that planted in the very constitution of 
 the elective system there is a sort of limitation on wayward choice. 
 This limitation seems to me, as Professor Ladd says he found it, 1 
 a tolerable preventive of choices directly aimed at ease. In a 
 community devoted to athletics, base ball is not played because it 
 is " soft," and foot-ball avoided on account of its difficulty. A 
 similar state of things must be brought about in studies. In a 
 certain low degree it has come about already. As election breeds 
 new life in teaching, the old slovenly habit of liking best what 
 costs least begins to disappear. Easy courses will exist and ought 
 to exist. Prescribed colleges, it is often forgotten, have more of 
 them than elective colleges. The important matter is, that they 
 fall to the right persons. Where everything is prescribed, stu- 
 dents who do not wish easy studies are still obliged to take them. 
 Under election, soft courses may often be pursued with advantage. 
 A student whose other courses largely depend for their profit on 
 the amount of private reading or of laboratory practice accom- 
 plished in connection with them is wise in choosing one or more 
 in which the bulk of the work is taken by the teacher. I do not 
 say that soft courses are always selected with these wise aims in 
 view. Many I know are not. We have our proper share of hard- 
 ened loafers " tares in our sustaining corn " who have an un- 
 erring instinct as to where they can most safely settle. But large 
 numbers of the men in soft courses are there to good purpose, and 
 I maintain that the superficial study of a subject, acquainting one 
 with broad outlines, is not necessarily a worthless study. At Har- 
 vard to-day I believe we have too few such superficial courses. As 
 I look over the Elective Pamphlet, and note the necessarily vary- 
 ing degrees of difficulty in the studies announced there, I count 
 but six which can, with any justice, be entitled soft courses ; and 
 several of these must be reckoned by anybody an inspiration to 
 the students who pursue them. There is a tendency in the elective 
 
 1 " Doubtless some have carried out the intention of making everything as 
 soft as possible for themselves. But the choices, in fact, do not as yet show 
 the existence of any such intention in any considerable number of cases ; they 
 show rather the very reverse." Professor Ladd in The New Englander, Jan- 
 uary, 1885, p. 119. 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 7 
 
 system, as I have shown elsewhere, to reduce the number of soft 
 courses somewhat below the desirable number. 
 
 I insist, therefore, that under a pretty loose elective system boys 
 are little disposed to intentionally vicious choices. My fears look 
 in a different direction. I do not expect depravity, but I want to 
 head off aimless trifling. I agree with the opponents of election 
 in thinking that there is danger, especially during the early years 
 of college life, that righteous intention may not be distinct and 
 energetic. Boys drift. Inadequate influences induce their de- 
 cisions. The inclinations of the clique in which a young man 
 finds himself are, without much thought, accepted as his own. 
 Heedlessness is the young man's bane. It should not be mistaken 
 for vice. The two are different. A boy who will enter a dormi- 
 tory at twelve o'clock at night, and go to the third story whistling 
 and beating time on the banisters, certainly seems a brutish 
 person ; but he is ordinarily a kind enough fellow, capable of a 
 good deal of self-sacrifice when brought face to face with need. 
 He simply does not think. So it is in study : there, too, he does 
 not think. Now in college a boy should learn perpetually to 
 think ; and an excellent way of helping him to learn is to ask 
 him often what he is thinking about. The object of the question- 
 ing should not be to thwart the boy's aims, rather to insure that 
 these are in reality his own. Essentially his to the last they 
 should remain, even though they may not be intrinsically the best. 
 Young persons, much more than their elders, require to talk over 
 plans from time to time with an experienced critic, in order to 
 learn by degrees the difficult art of planning. By such talk 
 intentionality is fortified. There is much of this talk already; 
 talk of younger students with older, talk with wise persons at 
 home, and more and more every year with the teachers of the 
 courses left and the courses entered. All this is good. Hap- 
 hazard modes breed an astonishing average of choices that possess 
 a meaning. The waste of a laissez-faire system comes nowhere 
 near the waste of a prescribed. But what is good when compared 
 with a bad thing may be poor when compared with excellence itself. 
 "We must go on. A college, like a man, must always be saying, 
 " Never was I so good as to-day, and never again will I be so bad." 
 We must welcome criticisms more than praises, and seek after 
 our weak points as after hid treasures. The elective system seems 
 to me weak at present through lacking organized means of bring- 
 ing the student and his intentions face to face. Intentions grow 
 by being looked at. At the English universities a young man 
 
8 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 on entering a college is put in charge of a special tutor, without 
 whose consent he can do little either in the way of study or of 
 personal management. 1 Dependence so extreme is perhaps better 
 suited to an infant school than to an American college ; and even 
 in England, where respectful subservience on the part of the young 
 has been cultivated for generations, the system is losing ground. 
 Since the tutors were allowed to marry and to leave the college 
 home, tutorial influence has been changing. In most American 
 colleges twenty-five years ago there were officers known as class 
 tutors, to whom, in case of need, a student might turn. Petty 
 permissions were received from these men, instead of from a me- 
 chanical central office. So far as this plan set personal supervision 
 in the place of routine it was, in my eyes, good. But the relation 
 of a class tutor to his boys was usually one of more awe than 
 friendship. At Johns Hopkins University a board of advisers 
 has been instituted, to some member of which each student is 
 assigned at entrance. The adviser is to stand in loco parentis to 
 his charges. The value of such adjustments depends on the nature 
 of the parental tie. If the relation is worked so as to stimulate 
 the student's independence, it is good'; if so as to discharge him 
 from responsibility, it unfits for the life that is to follow. At 
 Harvard special students not candidates for a degree have re- 
 cently been put in charge of a committee, to whom they are 
 obliged to report their previous history and their plans of study 
 for each succeeding year. It is the business of the committee to 
 know at all times what their charges are doing. Something of 
 this sort, I am convinced, will be demanded at no distant day, as a 
 means of steadying all students in elective colleges. Large per- 
 sonal supervision need not mean diminution of freedom. A young 
 man may possess his freedom more solidly if he recognizes an 
 obligation to state and defend the reasons which induce his choice. 
 For myself, I should be willing to make the functions of such 
 advisory committees somewhat broad. As a college grows, the old 
 ways of bringing about acquaintance between officers and students 
 become impracticable. But the need of personal acquaintance, 
 unhappily, does not cease. New ways should be provided. A 
 boy dropped into the middle of a large college must not be lost to 
 sight. He must be looked after. To allow the teacher's work of 
 
 1 As the minute personal care given to individual students in the English 
 universities is often and deservedly praised, I may as well say that it costs 
 something. Oxford spends each year about $2,000,000 on 2,500 men; Harvard, 
 $650,000 on 1,700. 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 9 
 
 instruction to become divorced from his pastoral, his priestly, 
 function is to cheapen and externalize education. I would have 
 every student in college supplied with somebody who might serve 
 as a discretionary friend : and I should not think it a disadvantage 
 that such an expectation of friendship would be as apt to better 
 the instructor as the student. 
 
 Before leaving this part of my subject, I may mention a sub- 
 ordinate, but still valuable, means of limiting choice so as to 
 increase its intentionality. The studies open to choice in the 
 early years should be few and elementary. The significance of 
 advanced courses cannot be understood till elementary ones are 
 mastered, and immature choice should not be confused by many 
 issues. At Harvard this mode of limitation is largely employed. 
 Although the elective list for 1885-86 shows 172 courses, a fresh- 
 man has hardly more than one eighth of these to choose from ; in 
 any given case this number will probably be reduced about one 
 half by insufficient preparation or conflict of hours. Seemingly 
 about a third of the list is offered to the average sophomore ; but 
 this amount is again cut down nearly one half by the operation of 
 similar causes. The practice of hedging electives with qualifica- 
 tions is a growing one. It may well grow more. It offers guid- 
 ance precisely at the point where it is most needed. It protects 
 rational choice, and guards against many of the dangers which 
 the foes of election justly dread. 
 
 A second class of limitations of the elective system, possible 
 and friendly, springs from the need of furnishing the young elec- 
 tor ample information about that which he is to choose. The best 
 intentions require judicious aim. If studies are taken in the 
 dark, without right anticipation of their subject-matter, or in 
 ignorance of their relation to other studies, small results follow. 
 Here, I think it will be generally agreed, prescribed systems are 
 especially weak. Their pupils have little knowledge beforehand 
 of what a course is designed to accomplish. Work is undertaken 
 blindly, minds consenting as little as wills. An elective system 
 is impossible under such conditions. Its student must know when 
 he chooses, what he chooses. He must be able to estimate whether 
 the choice of Greek 5 will further his designs better than the 
 choice of Greek 8. 
 
 At Harvard, methods of furnishing information are pretty fully 
 developed. In May an elective pamphlet is issued, which an- 
 nounces everything that is to be taught in the college during the 
 following year. Most departments, also, issue additional pamphlets, 
 
10 Possible Limitations of the Mective System. 
 
 describing with much detail the nature of their special courses, 
 and the considerations which should lead a student to one rather 
 than another. If the courses of a department are arranged prop- 
 erly, pursuing one gives the most needful knowledge about the 
 available next. This knowledge is generally supplemented at the 
 close of the year by explanations on the part of the instructor 
 about the courses that follow. In the Elective Pamphlet a star, 
 prefixed to courses of an advanced and specially technical char- 
 acter, indicates that the instructor must be privately consulted 
 before these courses can be chosen. Consultations with instructors 
 about all courses are frequent. That most effective means of 
 distributing information, the talk of students, goes on unceas- 
 ingly. With time, perhaps, means may be devised for informing 
 a student more largely what he is choosing. The fullest infor- 
 mation is desirable. That which is at present most needed is, I 
 think, some rough indication of the relations of the several prov- 
 inces of study to one another. Information of this sort is pecul- 
 iarly hard to supply, because the knowledge on which it professes 
 to rest cannot be precise and unimpeachable. We deal here 
 with intricate problems, in regard to which experts are far from 
 agreed, problems where the different point of view provided in the 
 nature of each individual will rightly readjust whatever general 
 conclusions are drawn. The old type of college had an easy way 
 of settling these troublesome matters dogmatically, by voting, in 
 open faculty-meeting, what should be counted the normal sequence 
 of studies, and what their mixture. But as the votes of different 
 colleges showed no uniformity, people have gradually come to 
 perceive that the subject is one where only large outlines can dis- 
 tinctly be made out. 1 To these large outlines I think it important 
 
 1 I may not have a better opportunity than this to clear up a petty difficulty 
 which seems to agitate some of my critics. They say they want the degree of 
 A. B. to mean something definite, while at present, under the elective system, 
 it means one thing for John Doe, and something altogether different for his 
 classmate, Kichard Roe. That is true. Besides embodying the general signi- 
 fication that the bearer has been working four years in a way to satisfy college 
 guardians, the stately letters do take on an individual variation of meaning for 
 every man who wins them. They must do so as long as we are engaged in the 
 formation of living persons. If the college were a factory, our case would be 
 different. We might then offer a label which would keep its identity of meaning 
 for all the articles turned out. Wherever education has been a living thing, 
 the single degree has always contained this element of variety. The German 
 degree is as diverse in meaning as ours. The degree of the English university 
 is diverse, and more diverse for Honors men the only ones who can properly 
 be said to deserve it - than for inert Pass men. Degrees in this country have, 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 11 
 
 to direct the attention of undergraduates. In most German uni- 
 versities a course of " Encyclopedic " is offered, a course which 
 gives in brief a survey of the sciences, and attempts to fix ap- 
 proximately the place of each in the total organization of knowl- 
 edge. I am not aware that such a course exists in any American 
 college. Indeed, there was hardly a place for it till dogmatic pre- 
 scription was shaken. But if something of the kind were now es- 
 tablished in the freshman year, our young men might be relieved 
 of a certain intellectual short-sightedness, and the choices of one 
 year might better keep in view those of the other three. 
 
 And now granting that a student has started with good inten- 
 tions and is well informed about the direction where profit lies, still 
 have we any assurance that he will push those intentions with a 
 fair degree of tenacity through the distractions which beset his 
 daily path? We need, indeed we must have, a third class of 
 helpful limitations which may be influential over the persistent 
 adhesion of our student to his chosen line of work. Probably 
 this class of limitations is the most important and complex of all. 
 To yield a paying return, study must be stuck to. A decision has 
 little meaning unless the volition of to-day brings in its train a 
 volition to-morrow. Self-direction implies such patient continu- 
 ance in well-doing that only after persistence has become somewhat 
 habitual can choice be called mature. To establish onward -leading 
 habits, therefore, should be one of the chief objects in devising 
 limitations of election. Only we must not mistake. We must 
 look below the surface. Mechanical diligence often covers mental 
 sloth. It is not habits of passive docility that are desirable, 
 habits of timidity and uncriticising acceptance. Against forming 
 these pernicious and easily acquired habits, it may be necessary 
 even to erect barriers. The habit wanted is the habit of spon- 
 taneous attack. Prescription deadened this vital habit. It mech- 
 anized. His task removed, the student had little independent mo- 
 mentum. Election invigorates the springs of action. Formerly I 
 did not see this, and I favored prescribed systems, thinking them 
 systems of duty. That absence of an aggressive intellectual life 
 
 from the first, had considerable diversity, college differing from college in 
 requirement, and certainly student from student in attainment. That twenty- 
 five years ago we were approaching too great uniformity in the signification of 
 degrees, I suppose most educators now admit. That was a mechanical and 
 stagnant period, and men have brought over from it to the more active days of 
 the present ideals formed then. Precision of statement goes with figures, with 
 etiquette, with military matters ; but descriptions of the quality of persons 
 must be stated in the round. 
 
12 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 which prescribed studies induce, I, like many others, mistook for 
 faithfulness. Experience has instructed me. I no longer have 
 any question that for the average man sound habits of steady 
 endeavor grow best in fields of choice. Emerson's words are words 
 of soberness : 
 
 " He that worketh high and wise 
 
 Nor pauses in his plan, 
 Will take the sun out of the skies 
 Ere freedom out of man." 
 
 Furthermore, in attempting to stimulate persistence, I believe 
 we must ultimately rely on the rational interest in study which we 
 can arouse and hold. Undoubtedly much can be done to save this 
 interest from disturbance and to hold vacillating attention fixed 
 upon it ; but it, and it alone, is to be the driving force. Methods 
 of college government must be reckoned wise as they push into 
 the foreground the intrinsic charm of wisdom, mischievous as 
 they hide it behind fidelity to technical demand. In other matters 
 we readily acknowledge interest as an efficient force. We call it 
 a force as broad as the worth of knowledge, and as deep as the 
 curiosity of man. " Put your heart into your work," we say, " if 
 you will make it excellent." A dozen proverbs tell that it is love 
 that makes the world go round. Every employment of life springs 
 from an underlying desire. The cricketer wants to win the game ; 
 the fisherman to catch fish ; the farmer to gather crops ; the mer- 
 chant to make money ; the physician to cure his patient ; the 
 student to become wise. Eliminate desire, put in its place al- 
 legiance to the rules of a game, and what, in any of these cases, 
 would be the chance of persistent endeavor? It seems almost 
 a truism to say that limitations of personal effort designed to 
 strengthen persistency must be such as will heighten the wish and 
 clear its path to its object. 
 
 Obvious as is the truth here presented, it seems in some degree 
 to have escaped the attention of my critics. After showing that 
 the grade of scholarship at Harvard steadily rises, that our stu- 
 dents become more decorous and their methods of work less child- 
 ish, I stated that, under an extremely loose mode of regulating at- 
 tendance five sixths of the exercises were attended by all our men, 
 worst and best, sick and well, most reckless and most discreet. 
 Few portions of my obnoxious paper have occasioned a louder 
 outcry. I am told of a neighboring college where the benches 
 show but three per cent, of absentees. I wonder what the per- 
 centage is in Charlestown State Prison. Nobody doubts that at- 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective &ystem. 13 
 
 tendance will be closer if compelled. But the interesting question 
 still remains, "Are students by such means learning habits of 
 spontaneous regularity ? " This question can be answered only 
 when the concealing restraint is removed. It has been removed 
 at Harvard, in my judgment too largely removed, and the 
 great body of our students are seen to desire learning and to de- 
 sire it all the time. Is it certain that the students of other col- 
 leges, if left with little or no restraint, would show a better record ? 
 The point of fidelity and regularity, it is said, is of supreme im- 
 portance. So it is. But fidelity and regularity in study, not in 
 attending recitations. If ever the Harvard system is perfected, so 
 that students here are as eager for knowledge as the best class of 
 German university men, I do not believe we shall see a lower rate 
 of absence ; only then, each absence will be used, as it is not at 
 present, for a studious purpose. The modern teacher stimulates 
 private reading, exacts theses, directs work in libraries. Pupils 
 engaged in these things are not dependent on recitations as text- 
 book school-boys are. The grade of higher education cannot rise 
 much so long as the present extreme stress is laid on appearance 
 in the class-room. 
 
 In saying this I would not be understood to defend the method 
 of dealing with absences which has for some years been practiced 
 at Harvard. I think the method bad. I have always thought it 
 so, and have steadily favored a different system. The behavior 
 of our students under a regulation so loose seems to me a striking 
 testimony to the scholarly spirit prevalent here. As such I men- 
 tioned it in my first paper, and as such I would again call atten- 
 tion to it. But I am not satisfied with the present good results. 
 I want to impress on every student that absence from the class- 
 room can be justified by nothing short of illness or a scholarly pur- 
 pose. For a gainful purpose the merchant is occasionally absent 
 from his office ; for a gainful purpose a scholar of mine may omit 
 a recitation. But Smith can be absent profitably when Brown 
 would meet with loss. I accordingly object to methods of limiting 
 absence which exact the same numerical regularity of all. College 
 records may look clean, yet students be learning little about duty. 
 Limitation, in my judgment, should be so adjusted as to strengthen 
 the man's personal adhesion to plans of daily study. Such lim- 
 itations cannot be fixed by statute and worked by a single clerk. 
 Moral discipline is not a thing to be supplied by wholesale. Pro- 
 fessors must be individually charged with the oversight of their 
 men. I should have excuses for occasional absence made to the 
 
14 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 instructor, and I should expect him to count it a part of his work 
 to see that the better purposes of his scholars did not grow feeble. 
 A professor who exercised such supervisory power slackly would 
 make his course the resort of the indolent ; one who was over- 
 stringent would see himself deserted by indolent and earnest alike. 
 My rule would be that no student be allowed to present himself at 
 an examination who could not show his teacher's certificate that 
 his attendance on daily work was satisfactory. Traditions in this 
 country and in Germany are so different that I should have confi- 
 dence in a method working well here though it worked ill there. 
 At any rate, whenever it fell into decay, it could a proviso 
 necessary in all moral matters be readjusted. A rule something 
 like this the Harvard Faculty has recently adopted by voting 
 that " any instructor, with the approval of the Dean, may at any 
 time exclude from his course any student who in his judgment has 
 neglected the work of the course." Probably the amount of ab- 
 sence which has hitherto occurred at Harvard will under this vote 
 diminish. 
 
 Suppose, then, by these limitations on a student's caprice we 
 have secured his persistence in outward endeavor, still one thing 
 more is needed. We have brought him bodily to a recitation 
 room; but his mind must be there too, his aroused and active 
 mind. Limitations that will secure this slippery part of the per- 
 son are difficult to devise. Nevertheless, they are worth studying. 
 Their object is plain. They are to lead a student to do something 
 every day ; to aid him to overcome those tendencies to procrasti- 
 nation, self-confidence, and passive absorption, which are the reg- 
 ular and calculable dangers of youth. They are to teach him 
 how not to cram, to inspire him with respect for steady effort, 
 and to enable him each year to find such effort more habitual to 
 himself. These are hard tasks. The old education tried to meet 
 them by the use of daily recitations, a plan not without advan- 
 tages. The new education is preserving the valuable features of 
 recitations by adopting and developing the Seminar. But recita- 
 tions pure and simple have serious drawbacks. They presuppose 
 a text-book, which, while it brings definiteness, brings also nar- 
 rowness of view. The learner masters a book, not a subject. 
 After-life has nothing analogous to the text -book. A strug- 
 gling man wins what he wants from many books, from his own 
 thought, from frequent consultations. Why should not a stu- 
 dent be disciplined in the ways he must afterwards employ? 
 Moreover, recitations have the disadvantage that no large number 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 15 
 
 of men can take part on any single day. The times of trial either 
 become amenable to reckoning, or, in order to prevent reckoning, 
 a teacher must resort to schemes which do not commend him to 
 his class. Undoubtedly in recitation the reciter gains, but the 
 gains of the rest of the class are small. The listeners would be 
 more profited by instruction. An hour with an expert should 
 carry students forward ; to occupy it in ascertaining where they 
 now stand is wasteful. For all these reasons there has been of 
 late years a strong reaction against recitations. Lectures have 
 been introduced, and the time formerly spent by a professor in 
 hearing boys is now spent by boys in hearing a professor. Plainly 
 in this there is a gain, but a gain which needs careful limitation 
 if the student's persistence of work is to be retained. A pure 
 lecture system is a broad road to ignorance. Students are enter- 
 tained or bored, but at the end of a month they know little more 
 than at the beginning. Lectures always seem to me an inheritance 
 from the days when books were not. Learning how often must 
 it be said ! is not acceptance ; it is criticism, it is attack, it is 
 doing. An active element is everywhere involved in it. Personal 
 sanction is wanted for every step. One who will grow wise must 
 perform processes himself, not sit at ease and behold another's 
 performance. 
 
 These simple truths are now tolerably understood at Harvard. 
 There remain in the college few courses of pure recitations or 
 of pure lectures. I wish all were forbidden by statute. In al- 
 most all courses, in one way or another, frequent opportunity is 
 given the student to show what he is doing. In some, especially 
 in elementary courses, lectures run parallel with a text-book. In 
 some, theses, that is, written discussions, are exacted monthly, 
 half-yearly, annually, in addition to examinations. In some, ex- 
 aminations are frequent. In some, a daily question, to be an- 
 swered in writing on the spot, is offered to the whole class. Often, 
 especially in philosophical subjects, the hour is occupied with de- 
 bate between officer and students. More and more, physical sub- 
 jects are taught by the laboratory, linguistic and historical by the 
 library. In a living university a great variety of methods spring 
 up, according to the nature of the subject and the personality of 
 the teacher. Variety should exist. In constantly diversified ways 
 each student should be assured that he is expected to be doing 
 something all the time, and that somebody besides himself knows 
 what he is doing. As yet this assurance is not attained. We can 
 only claim to be working towards it. Every year we discover 
 
16 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 some fresh limitation which will make persistence more natural, 
 neglect more strange. I believe study at Harvard is to-day more 
 interested, energetic, and persistent than it has ever been before. 
 But that is no ground for satisfaction. A powerful college must 
 forever be dissatisfied. Each year it must address itself anew to 
 strengthening the tenacity of its students in their zeal for knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 By the side of these larger limitations in the interest of persist- 
 ency, it may be well to mention one or two examples of smaller 
 ones which have the same end in view. By some provision it 
 must be made difficult to withdraw from a study once chosen. 
 Choice should be deliberate and then be final. It probably will not 
 be deliberate unless it is understood to be final. A few weeks may 
 be allowed for an inspection of a chosen course, but at the close of 
 the first month's teaching the Harvard Faculty tie up their stu- 
 dents and allow change only on petition and for the most convinc- 
 ing cause. An elective college which did not make changes of 
 electives difficult would be an engine for discouraging intentional- 
 ity and persistence. 
 
 I incline to think, too, that a regulation forbidding elementary 
 courses in the later years would render our education more co- 
 herent. In this matter elective colleges have an opportunity which 
 prescribed ones miss. In order to be fair to all the sciences, Col- 
 lege Faculties are obliged to scatter fragments of them through- 
 out the length and breadth of prescribed curricula. Twenty-five 
 years ago every Harvard man waited till his senior year before 
 beginning philosophy, acoustics, history, and political economy. 
 To-day the fourteen other New England colleges, most of whom, 
 like the Harvard of twenty-five years ago, offer a certain number 
 of elective studies, still show senior years largely occupied with 
 elementary studies. Five forbid philosophy before the senior 
 year ; eight, political economy ; two, history ; six, geology. Out 
 of the seven colleges which offer some one of the eastern lan- 
 guages, all except Harvard oblige the alphabet to be learned in 
 the senior year. Of the six which offer Italian or Spanish, Har- 
 vard alone permits a beginning to be made before the junior year, 
 while two take up these languages for the first time in the senior 
 year. In three New England colleges German cannot be begun 
 till the junior year. In a majority, a physical subject is begun in 
 the junior and another in the senior year. At Yale nobody but 
 a senior can study chemistry. Such postponement, and by con- 
 sequence such fragmentary work, may be necessary where early 
 
Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 17 
 
 college years are crowded with prescribed studies. But an elec- 
 tive system can employ its later years to better advantage. It can 
 bring to a mature understanding the interests which freshmen and 
 sophomores have already acquired. Elementary studies are not 
 maturing studies. They do not make the fibre of a student firm. 
 To studies of a solidifying sort the last years should be devoted. 
 I should like to forbid seniors to take any elementary study what- 
 ever, and to forbid juniors all except philosophy, political economy, 
 history, fine arts, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and law. Under such a rule 
 we should graduate more men who would be first rate at some- 
 thing ; and a man who is first rate at something is generally pretty 
 good at anything. 
 
 Such, then, are a few examples of the ways in which choice may 
 be limited so as to become strong. They are but examples, in- 
 tended merely to draw attention to the kinds of limitation still 
 possible. Humble ways they may seem, not particularly interest- 
 ing to hear about ; business methods one might call them. But 
 by means of these and such as these the young scholar becomes 
 clearer in intention, larger in information, hardier in persistence. 
 In urging such means I shall be seen to be no thick and thin ad- 
 vocate of election. That I have never been. Originally a doubter, 
 I have come to regard the elective system, that is, election under 
 such limitations as I have described, as the safest indeed as the 
 only possible course which education can now take. I advocate 
 it heartily as a system which need not carry us too fast or too far 
 in any one direction, as a system so inherently flexible that its own 
 great virtues readily unite with those of an alien type. Under its 
 sheltering charge the worthier advantages of both grouped and 
 prescribed systems are attainable. I proclaim it, therefore, not 
 as a popular cry nor as an educational panacea, but as a sober op- 
 portunity for moral and intellectual training. Limited as it is at 
 Harvard, I see that it works admirably with the studious, stimu- 
 latingly with those of weaker will, not unendurably with the de- 
 praved. These are great results. They cannot be set aside by 
 calling them the outcome of " individualism." In a certain sense 
 they are. But "individualism " is an uncertain term. In every one 
 of us there is a contemptible individuality, grounded in what is 
 ephemeral and capriciously personal. Systematic election, as I 
 have shown, puts limitations on this. But there is a noble individ- 
 uality which should be the object of our fostering care. Nothing 
 that lends it strength and fineness can be counted trivial. To 
 
 2 
 
18 Possible Limitations of the Elective System. 
 
 form a true individuality is, indeed, the ideal of the elective sys- 
 tem. Let me explain my conception of that ideal. 
 
 George Herbert, praising God for the physical world which He 
 has made, says that in it " all things have their will, yet none but 
 thine." Such a free harmony between thinking man and a Lord 
 of his thought it is the office of education to bring about. At the 
 start it does not exist. The child is aware of his own will, and he 
 is aware of little else. He imagines that one pleasing fancy may 
 be willed as easily as another. As he matures, he discovers t^at 
 his will is effective when it accords with the make of the world 
 and ineffective when it does not. This discovery, bringing as it 
 does increased respect for the make of the world, and even for its 
 maker, degrades or ennobles according as the facts of the world 
 are nqjv viewed as restrictive finalities or as an apparatus for 
 larger self-expression. Seeing the power of that which is not him- 
 self, a man may become passively receptive, and say, " Then I am 
 to have no will of my own ; " or he may become newly energetic, 
 knowing that though he can have no will of his separate own, yet 
 all the power of God is his if he will but understand. A man of 
 the latter sort is spiritually educated. Much still remains to be 
 done in understanding special laws, and with each fresh under- 
 standing a fresh possibility of individual life is disclosed. But the 
 worth of the whole process lies in the man's honoring his own will, 
 but honoring it only as it grows strong through accordance with 
 the will of God. 
 
 Now into our colleges comes a mixed multitude made up of all 
 the three classes named : the childish, who imagine they can will 
 anything ; the docile, so passive in the presence of an ordered world 
 that they have little individual will left ; the spiritually-minded or 
 original, who with strong interests of their own seek to develop 
 these through living contact with truths which they have not 
 made. Our educational modes must meet them all, respecting 
 their wills wherever wise, and teaching the feeble to discriminate 
 fanciful from righteous desires. For carrying forward such a 
 training the elective system seems to me to have peculiar apti- 
 tudes. What I have called its limitations will be seen to be spirit- 
 ual assistances. To the further invention of such there is no end. 
 A watchful patience is the one great requisite, patience in di- 
 rectors, instructed criticism on the part of the public, and a brave 
 expression of confidence when confidence is seen to have been 
 earned. 
 
 G. H. Palmer. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 
 


 
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