OF EDUCATION 
 
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 Copy 1 
 
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 I 
 
Class _.JJBlli 
 Book JB t5 
 
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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2011 with funding from 
 The Library of Congress 
 
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Eic&arfc Eo^ers 33atofter 
 
 THE ARTS OF LIFE. 
 
 i6mo, flexible leather, $1.25, net. 
 OF BUSINESS. 
 OF POLITICS. 
 OF RELIGION. 
 
 Each, i6mo, 50 cents. 
 OF EDUCATION. 
 
 i6mo, 75 cents. 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
 Boston and New York. 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
€^e arts of life 
 
 
 OF EDUCATION 
 
 
 WITH APPENDED ADDRESSES ON 
 
 "THE SCHOLAR" AND "THE 
 
 COLLEGE OF TO-DAY" 
 
 
 BY 
 
 
 RICHARD ROGERS BOWKER 
 
 
 9Hf 
 
 
 1111 
 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 @tf)t fttoer#&e $re£& Cambribge. 
 1903 
 
 
THE LIBRA 
 CONG RE 
 
 RY OF 
 
 Two C • 
 
 deceived 
 
 APR 24 
 
 1903 
 
 Copyright Entry 
 CLASS ^ XXc. No 
 COPY B, ' 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1900 AND 1903, 
 
 BY RICHARD ROGERS BOWKER. 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 
 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 proem: the scholar . . . . . vii 
 
 OF EDUCATION ...... I 
 
 THE SCHOLAR : THE MAKING AND THE USE OF 
 
 HIM . . .46 
 
 THE COLLEGE OF TO-DAY J$ 
 
PROEM 
 
 THE SCHOLAR 
 
 The Scholar, where stands he ? Ill for the State 
 If, weakening in the strife, and short of sight, 
 He let the world wag on and shirk the fight. 
 
 Well for us all if brave, compelling Fate, 
 
 A lighthoused rock, steadfast he stand and straight. 
 Holdfast the faith, make manifest the light. 
 For this is he, who, strong in wisdom 's might, 
 
 Is Teacher, Prophet, Leader consecrate. 
 
 With star-eyed science he sees th? infinite small, 
 And with faith? s vision looks beyond the seen, 
 
 Notes from one germ evolve the myriad all 
 
 And the Shall Be unfold from the Has Been. 
 
 So, doubting not, but wise all things to prove, 
 
 He sights the stars and knows the world does move. 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 [HE first of the arts of life is edu- 
 cation, the leading forth of the Education 
 human faculties, in the child, f^o? VO " 
 the youth, the man, as Na- 
 ture makes ready. As Nature 
 evolves, man should educate. Education must 
 be in even step with evolution. In leading 
 the child we must follow Nature. When 
 Miss Sullivan, whose own sealed eyes had 
 been opened to the light, was sent to open 
 the sealed soul of Helen Keller, after she had 
 studied all Dr. Howe had told of Laura Bridg- 
 man, Mr. Anagnos asked, in test of her, how 
 she would teach the child. " I do not know," 
 she said; "I will let the child teach me." 
 She had proved her fitness, for she voiced 
 the watchword of true education. In teach- 
 ing the child, we must learn from Nature, 
 from child-nature. Thus the human atom is 
 fitted into its place in the great universe. 
 Looking forward to the successive stages 
 of development, the experience of parents, 
 or teachers, should become pre-vision and 
 pro-vision for the children. It is thus the 
 race climbs, as each generation rises one 
 step higher on the accumulations of past ex- 
 i 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 perience. If it does not rise, it falls ; and 
 so nations decline, and fall, and are blotted 
 out. 
 
 In the beginning the child has no personal 
 Experience responsibility ; its birth follows the birth of 
 theChild t ^ ie ^ a ^ e at a cons iderable distance. It is only- 
 well toward maturity that this becomes com- 
 plete : indeed it is a prime purpose and test of 
 education to produce personal responsibility. 
 But education begins with birth, nay before 
 birth. The highest product, man, is slowest 
 in pre-natal development and in shifting for 
 itself after birth. Thus the experience gained 
 by the parents is stored in the child, to an 
 extent broadly dividing man from his fellow 
 animals. Nature is here a banker, and ad- 
 vances to each generation the parental care 
 it is expected to pay back through the gen- 
 eration succeeding. 
 
 The first duty of parentage, thus, is of 
 The Duty of educating self to educate the child ; and this 
 Parentage mus t properly begin before the birth of the 
 child, that the infant, the unknowing, may be 
 met with knowledge. When a fern comes 
 from the ground, it appears as a queer little 
 wad, which presently unfolds and unrolls ac- 
 cording to the laws of fern-kind into full 
 
 2 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 frondage, as the gardener fore-knows it will 
 do, but as few others could foresee. The 
 child has a like development, according to 
 the laws of humankind, which it is the busi- 
 ness of the parent to fore-know. These laws 
 can be learned, and the dim and partial know- 
 ledge of instinct or of half-remembered ex- 
 perience is by no means a substitute to excuse 
 the parent from the responsibility of intelli- 
 gent study. 
 
 For here, even as elsewhere, Nature may 
 not distinguish between ignorance and crime. Fatherhood 
 The laws of life are, above all, inexorable. 
 The inevitable doom for their transgression 
 is hard — alike whether it be innocent or pur- 
 posed. Of all relations, that whose conse- 
 quences are visited, for good or ill, unto the 
 third and fourth generation, — nay, through- 
 out all generations to come, — is least fore- 
 known. The man scarcely faces fatherhood 
 as a conscious end. As a college boy, no 
 training is too costly, no self-denial too diffi- 
 cult, no studious care and temperance of body 
 too hard, through weeks, months, and years, 
 for the winning of the race whose immediate 
 outcome is but the triumph of a day. But 
 when he enters the lists of a man's responsi- 
 bilities, intoxicate with love, or choosing in 
 3 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 colder motive the fulfiller of life, he gives to 
 marriage no such care of knowledge, or of 
 training, or of foreseeing, in body or in mind, 
 and he perchance foredooms her who is dear- 
 est to him and those who shall be nearest to 
 him, of his flesh and his blood, to defeat and 
 shadow and despair in that race of life which 
 he has lost for them before it is begun. The 
 Motherhood wife, indeed, consciously faces motherhood, 
 in the sweet prophecy of the little life which 
 she enfolds, yet, too late, she also finds her- 
 self unknowing, unprepared. In this great 
 mystery of the tenderest, the holiest, the 
 most far-reaching of all the relations of life, 
 the relation between the youth who is to be 
 father and the maiden who is to be mother, 
 our modern teaching and all our loving care 
 have so far failed to find how, without rend- 
 ing the veil of modesty and mystery, to give 
 to these two, with each other, the fore-know- 
 ing which we provide in our stock-raising for 
 the brute beasts or which Nature implants 
 in them as instinct. But to this need, which 
 science, with its doctrines of heredity, more 
 and more emphasizes, the answer will come 
 as the need is fully seen. 
 
 Those are among the greatest benefactors 
 4 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 of the race, who, from Pestalozzi, with his The Refor- 
 divinings and his so human mistakes, and Education 
 Froebel, with his noble devotion, have labored 
 to teach the teachers this first of the arts of 
 life, by investigating what these laws of de- 
 velopment are. These are the Columbus, 
 the Galileo, the Newton, the Luther, of the 
 child's world ; Protestants for childhood, they 
 have prepared and preached a Reformation 
 in which, here also, Nature, freedom, individ- 
 uality, are vindicated. For there have been 
 terrible mistakes. Nature tells the child to 
 touch, to observe, to test, to ask questions, 
 to imitate ; but a belittled Pope bulled and 
 bullied in the household. It was " don't 
 touch ; " " do as Papa or Mamma (or more ig- 
 norant nurse) says, and don't ask Why ; " 
 " keep quiet ; " " little folks should be seen 
 and not heard ; " and for imitation what ex- 
 ample could be worse than the fallible frailty 
 of brutal Infallibility? The child's Why, 
 that divining-rod which is Nature's gift to 
 the little explorer, brought no answering 
 spring of living water from the parental rock. 
 "Because," was a finality, and crushed the 
 childish mind. And when to this chill frost 
 upon the wee, outreaching, tender plant, there 
 was added the scarce lesser wrong of revers- 
 5 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 ing Nature's order, of teaching the science 
 before the art, grammar before speech, it was 
 only because Nature is strong and well in- 
 trenched, that children learned despite their 
 teachers. That within the passing generation 
 we have come to see our mistakes, to inquire 
 of Nature, to follow her better way, is per- 
 haps that for which the future should be, and 
 will be, most thankful to us. The great ad- 
 vance that has been made may best be seen by 
 using as the milepost on the path of progress 
 that most useful of teachers of a generation 
 ago, Herbert Spencer's " Education," which 
 teaches us also how much we have yet to 
 learn and to do. 
 
 The end of education is to make a whole 
 The Human man, full-rounded, in soul, in mind, in body. 
 Tri-unity. Health, wholeness, holiness, are from the 
 same root, in fact as in word. The hale or 
 whole man, integer vitae, is the man of phy- 
 sical perf ectness, of moral and spiritual fulfill- 
 ment, of intellectual completeness. A sound 
 body is a first need, because the higher 
 must build and have basis on the lower. A 
 sense of right, of the moral order, is the next 
 need, as the guide of life. Intellectual de- 
 velopment is the complement of these. 
 6 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 The ship must have sound hull and right 
 ballast, true compass and straight rudder, if 
 it is to take cargo and bring it to port. A 
 true education regards this human tri-unity 
 and interweaves these several strands in the 
 loom of life. Thus it equips the man and 
 develops character. 
 
 If, thus, the ideal and aim of humanity is 
 fullness of life, a first care must be for a a sound 
 sound body. "To be a good animal" — this Bod y 
 js the safest foundation for good morals and 
 good mind. He is most a man who has the 
 greatest quantity and best quality of life for 
 the longest time, who has most life through- 
 out most years. To lose years by too early 
 death, or months by induced disease, or 
 weeks by invited illness, or hours by distract- 
 ing pain, and to lose money (alas, to most 
 men a more marketable motive !) by the pos- 
 itive methods of long doctor's bills or the 
 negative methods of enforced idleness — all 
 such forfeiture of life is indeed too often sins 
 of the parents visited upon the children, sins 
 of careless omission and brutish ignorance 
 and even reckless defiance of known law that 
 are no less crimes because statute law cannot 
 reach them. Alas, that the innocent must 
 7 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 suffer ! For Nature heals, but she cannot 
 forgive. Yet through this suffering unmer- 
 ited, merited punishment comes at last to the 
 guilty also, in sad harvest of misery and of 
 sorrow and of loss. Physical education is 
 thus the sine qua non before moral and be- 
 fore intellectual education; and the parent 
 must set himself to know the laws of animal 
 life and of its environment, in which last such 
 miserable pettinesses as plumbing are, sad to 
 say, not safely to be passed by. 
 
 Indeed, as a question of morals, a first. 
 The Physi- duty is the physical duty of health. " Health 
 Hea?th ty ° f ^ s tne religion of the body." " Breaches of 
 the laws of health are physical sins." The 
 modern view of health is wholesomeness. 
 The old truth, sana mens sano corpore, we 
 now read more widely and wisely : Sana 
 mens, sanum corpus. A sound body is quite 
 as much, if not more, conditioned in a sound 
 mind, as a sound mind upon a sound body. 
 A right discipline of mind, a wholesome men- 
 tal attitude, often forestalls bodily ills and, 
 in a sense, prevents pain. The mind con- 
 trols a machine in which it lives, called the 
 body. " While this machine is to him," 
 man lives. It is his business, his duty, to 
 preserve this machine in working order. If 
 8 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 it stops, his mortal life is ended. If some 
 parts break, or rot, or wear, his body is crip- 
 pled ; if other parts, his mind is obscured, 
 loses control, is "lost." This body, like all 
 flesh, has in it the possibilities of decay, 
 and " germs " innumerable and forces mani- 
 fold menace it from within and from with- 
 out. 
 
 To the diseased mind, studying disease, it The 
 seems rather hopeless to try to live. A re- S 6 ^ 8 ,? of 
 tired physician, in the morbidity of idleness, 
 occupied himself by " having diseases." 
 But to the sane mind, whole, wholesome, 
 holy, it is the principle of life that conquers. 
 The single and sufficing security against 
 disease germs is in the vital soundness, or 
 wholeness, which resists their attack in ad- 
 vance, — like an alert garrison in a strong 
 fort, whose well-defended walls an enemy can 
 neither scale nor shatter. Vitality resists, 
 survives ; death is swallowed up in victory of 
 life. Life resurrects itself, rises triumphant 
 again over all. The wise machinist's care is 
 to prevent his machine from breaking, rather 
 than to repair it after breaking. Regimen, 
 the rule of good, is better than remedy, the 
 cure of ill. Drugs are but repair make- 
 shifts ; the wise physician, the master-ma- 
 
 9 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 chinist of the body, sets himself to keep the 
 body whole. 
 
 The good engineer is he whose engine is 
 Health not least out of service and who has least cost of 
 fromDis- repairs, because he fore-sees, provides against 
 ease strain by looking to his fuel, water, oil, and 
 
 keeping his machinery in running order. 
 And this he does not do by studying broken- 
 down engines and developing a morbid fear 
 of accident : he must simply know weak 
 points, curves and crossings, " look out " and 
 " take care." So health is not learned, by 
 child or adult, from disease, by introspective 
 study of morbid conditions, but from the 
 laws of life, by outlook and care-taking. 
 We need to know the human machine as 
 the engineer knows his engine, to provide 
 against strain by looking to our food, regi- 
 men, and storage of vitality : but the studies 
 of anatomy and physiology should give con- 
 fidence in life-power, not fear of death. 
 The true physician is an apostle of life, a 
 minister to the mind, a physician of the soul 
 — with the cheerful presence that brings 
 life and light and not discouragement and 
 gloom. In epidemic the dauntless mind 
 keeps the body sane, and escapes contagion. 
 The heat of fever is overcome by coolness of 
 10 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 mind. Courage conquers in the face of death. 
 An Arab tradition tells that where plague 
 kills one, fear kills ten. 
 
 The like is true even with the tottling 
 child. A child is naturally happy, in body Brave 
 as in mind. Its little bodily troubles pass M ° ther 
 by as fleeting clouds, if over-anxiety does brave 
 not emphasize them to the mind. It tries c 
 to walk : it falls. The wise mother, brave 
 and not fearful, takes this as matter-of- 
 course : so, then, does the child. Up, with 
 a smile, even if it hurts a bit — and try it 
 again 1 That is Nature's way of teaching to 
 walk — there is nothing to cry about ! The 
 unwise mother, over-anxious, catching the 
 weakling to her arms, concentrates its at- 
 tention upon the hurt, congesting the blood 
 there by the mental act, invents or magni- 
 fies for the child sense of fear and pain, and 
 so thwarts provident Nature. Thus, the 
 "cry-baby!" Brave mother makes brave 
 child, and it is the fearless who conquers. 
 Achilles, Arthur, Siegfried, Parsifal, the 
 fearless, the guileless, can be conquered only 
 by guile or by their own sin. 
 
 And Nature means us to be healthy — 
 whole of body. The head of a babies' hospital 
 witnesses that most children are born well. 
 ii 
 
Nature 
 means us 
 to be 
 healthy 
 
 Sowing 
 Seeds of 
 Death 
 
 THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 The apple bloom is always sweet, though the 
 tree be gnarled. Despite ills of heredity and 
 distortions from pre-natal life, infants have 
 commonly a working capital of life and health. 
 Nature does her best to give each of her 
 children a fair chance. It is by ill treatment 
 that they are made ill. It is ignorance, or 
 carelessness, or viciousness, that fore-dooms 
 so many to early death, or to death-in-life, — 
 the lack of knowledge, or of thought, or of 
 love. It is too often by the parent that the 
 seeds of death are sown. Swathed and 
 pinned, jounced and churned, the wee folk 
 are denied the free and quiet development of 
 Nature. And as their bodies are pinched, so 
 are their tempers thwarted by ignorant par- 
 ents. Nature indeed teaches the infant to 
 do valiant battle for life, and often it suc- 
 ceeds and survives against all disadvantage. 
 But what waste of life we might and should 
 avoid ! It is not possible to all to dower 
 their children with the best conditions of 
 life, — alas, ignorance or poverty forbids ! — 
 but what shall be said of those who, having 
 before them all possibilities, give instead of 
 bread a stone — those mothers and fathers 
 in homes of education, of wealth, of ease, 
 who, careless of the lives given to their care, 
 12 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 bring upon them, too late for cure, the curse 
 of broken law ? 
 
 Happy the child to whom a fair start in life 
 is given, by wise parents and wise teachers Physical 
 — for whom the call of nature for food is ?^? lop- 
 
 ment 
 
 met in even regularity, making abstinence 
 and long waiting more possible in adult life 
 when stress comes, with the sufficient, nutri- 
 tious, and varied diet nature demands for the 
 growing body ; for whom fit clothing, ruled 
 not by foolish fashion but by natural sense, 
 supplies protection and warmth, so that food, 
 needed for growth, is not wasted for mere 
 heating of the body ; for whom warm housing, 
 in its turn, saves waste and harmful exposure, 
 while open-air outing, pleasurable exercise, 
 and natural sport give to the body, and later 
 to the mind, what we rightly call free play. 
 As the child becomes youth these habits of 
 childhood make self-reliance more easy, and 
 give the right trend for adult life. Thus it 
 is made ready to master, unfearing but cau- 
 tious, its physical self and the physical forces 
 of external nature, — water, in swimming and 
 rowing ; animals, in riding and driving ; 
 weapons, in eye-and-hand practice ; mechan- 
 ical forces, in the wheel and the ball. This 
 physical training is in itself moral discipline, 
 13 
 
Education 
 
 THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 as is all Tightness, the evident answer of ef- 
 fect to cause. 
 
 The moral education of infancy and child- 
 Moral hood is still more a matter of parental re- 
 sponsibility, a more difficult matter also be- 
 cause it demands not only knowledge but 
 virtue, and that most difficult of virtues, self- 
 restraint. The child adopts the motives of 
 its elders, and its ethics are the ethics of 
 home exemplars. And nowhere is that fine 
 law of Nature, that demand creates supply, 
 more finely illustrated : in many a household 
 "a little child shall lead them," its elders, 
 into what we accurately call exemplary con- 
 duct. The parent is the god of the child. 
 From father and mother, by imitation, it gets 
 its first standards of conduct, its first motives 
 of ethics, its first religion. Whether we will 
 or no, the child has its direction given it at 
 the start by its parents, as the rifle gives aim 
 to the bullet. Injustice to a child is the 
 most cruel of wrongs. The revolt in a child's 
 heart when wrong is done it, when it is pun- 
 ished for what it did not mean to be wrong, 
 or for what it did not do, or because the 
 parent is out of temper, warps its being, and 
 gives it the first impulse of rebellion against 
 14 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 law, against Nature, against God. Nay, this 
 does worse ; for it confuses the very idea of 
 law, confounding it with brute force and 
 causeless will. The parental responsibility 
 for physical and moral education therefore 
 cannot be evaded by the parent, or dele- 
 gated to the Genius of Ignorance in however 
 neat a white cap, or even to the most just 
 and skilled of teachers. The parent cannot 
 shirk this duty, for it is the foundation duty 
 of parenthood. Likewise in the nurse and in 
 the teacher, character is the first requisite. 
 As a little child catches a brogue from a 
 nurse while it learns to talk, so it will catch 
 character, and develop in love or in hate. 
 The teacher of morals must himself be the 
 exemplar of justice. 
 
 The true moral education goes back of the 
 Mosaic Decalogue, " Thou shalt not," to " Thou 
 Nature's One-Law, sterner yet more kindly, 
 "Thou canst not." It is for the child to 
 learn, by reiterated experience, — as that 
 fire burns, that a mother's word is kept, that 
 edge-tools cut, that a lie hurts, — that effect 
 follows cause, that transgression involves re- 
 tribution, that law rules. The universe is 
 morally ordered, under the rule of law. 
 This is the first principle of moral education. 
 15 
 
 canst not " 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 Every school must be a school of law and 
 every teacher a lawgiver. 
 
 Nature is relentless, and awards sure 
 Nature is penalty for broken law. This also the child 
 relentless must j eani) m p rac tice rather than by pre- 
 cept. The one thought of parental discipline 
 should be, not punishment, but cor-rection, 
 righting the child. All penalty should be 
 the logical and necessary result of the child's 
 act ; if it willfully breaks a toy, it loses the 
 use of that toy and of other toys that it might 
 break ; if it is rude to playmate or mother, it 
 must suffer for the time the loss of compan- 
 ionship — and so on, through the calendar of 
 child-crimes. The one aim of moral educa- 
 tion should be to produce self-government in 
 accord with natural law. 
 
 The child, just at home, just in play, just 
 
 The Law of at school, becomes the just man, recogniz- 
 
 J* 1 f£ lteous " ing and regarding Law. As the great law 
 
 of justness, of righteousness, is learned by 
 
 its children, a nation becomes stanch and 
 
 strong and great, for all history teaches that 
 
 the rise and the fall of nations result from 
 
 conditions — of simple and steadfast virtue 
 
 at the beginning, of luxurious unmorality or 
 
 immorality at the end — that are above all 
 
 moral conditions. Names mean little. A na- 
 
 16 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 tion is not Christian unless its citizens are in 
 deed followers of the Christ. A nation is 
 not moral unless its citizens recognize cause 
 and effect, right and wrong, in private and 
 in public affairs. If our churches teach 
 our boys to play at war, and our ministers 
 condone unrighteousness ; if our economists 
 preach that trade is war and that each nation 
 is in commerce the enemy of each other; 
 if our workingmen teach that a man must 
 surrender his moral judgment or be denied 
 work as an enemy, — we may prate peace, 
 but war comes. And through the home, the 
 school, the church, the state, all teaching 
 must be based on the fact that health of 
 body, rightness of soul, are the physical and 
 moral foundation on which true living must 
 rest, and without which mere truth of intel- 
 lect is of no avail. For education must above 
 all teach how to live, in wholeness of life, 
 and it is on such education that a democracy 
 must rest and a republic endure. 
 
 We speak of physical, intellectual, moral 
 education ; but from the beginning Nature The Inter- 
 develops each in an interweaving of all. Education* 
 Nature has no sharp lines : she does not 
 separate landscapes, classes, knowledges, — 
 17 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 she merges one into another. Thus physical, 
 moral, intellectual education go hand in hand. 
 The physical education of the sense-organs 
 is the start of intellectual, as well as of moral 
 education. Of itself the child learns motion 
 — to use its limbs, to balance its body, to 
 creep, to stand, to walk, to climb. The child, 
 like all animals, is inquisitive. It puts things 
 in its mouth and to its nose ; it touches what 
 is within reach of the hand ; it is interested 
 to see and hear what is within range of 
 eye and ear. Thus it learns for itself tastes, 
 smells, forms, sounds — in a word, facts. 
 These facts it puts together, compares — and 
 at once sense-observation is supplemented 
 by thought-observation. With comparison 
 Thinking thinking begins. That which yields to the 
 egins hand, that which does not ; that which is 
 
 within reach of the hand, that which is not ; 
 that which shines to the eye, that which does 
 not — give thoughts of hard and soft, near 
 and far, light and shade. Qualities are dis- 
 tinguished. The object present is compared 
 with the object past. With association, mem- 
 ory begins. Here already are the rudiments 
 of intellectual education. The child also, 
 like many animals, is imitative. It seeks to 
 match with the voice what it hears with the 
 1 8 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 ear. Thus it learns speech and learns song, 
 as art, not as science. It delights in pictures 
 and forms, and likes to make them, and thus 
 begins to learn drawing and modeling. It 
 counts and arranges objects, and thus mathe- 
 matics and classification begin. Meantime, 
 the child learns, naturally, — that is by pro- 
 cess of nature, — other kinds of lessons. By 
 sour tastes, noxious smells, the burn of a fire, 
 the hurt of a fall, Nature gives warning, and 
 tells it to avoid ill, to respect gravitation. 
 From the persistent relation and succession 
 of facts, the notions of fitness and unfitness, 
 cause and effect, right and wrong, begin. 
 Here again are the very rudiments of moral 
 education. All this is Nature's doing — she 
 does this for the infant savage, indeed she 
 does much of it for the infant animal. 
 
 But Nature, always prodigal, does this at 
 unnecessary cost and waste. A wise teach- A wise 
 ing saves and safeguards. It puts the world- J^ves™ 5 
 experience of the race at the service of the Waste 
 newcomer. It is not well that a child should 
 be burned by the fire or bruised by a fall ; 
 this is costly and wasteful. Moreover the 
 senses must be righted. The child sees the 
 trees tossing in the wind, and thinks the 
 trees churn the wind ; the savage sees the sun 
 
 19 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 obscured by a cloud or by eclipse, and thinks 
 the cloud or an unseen demon has devoured 
 it ; the ancients saw the sun set, and thought 
 it sank in the ocean and went under the 
 earth ; the moderns still see the earth as the 
 great center of the heavens, surrounded by 
 shining points of light. The larger vision, 
 the wider experience, must correct these 
 natural errors of the uneducated senses. 
 Also, there are two sides of the objects and 
 forces of nature. Water cleanses and solves 
 for us ; fire warms us and cooks our food ; 
 gravitation holds all things together. Yet 
 water drowns ; fire burns ; gravitation crushes. 
 The ministrants of life become the ministers 
 of death. To safeguard against ill, to utilize 
 the good, without cruel experience, is also an 
 achievement of teaching. 
 
 As we face intellectual education, several 
 Intellectual questions as to the purposes, methods, and 
 results of " schooling " at once confront us. 
 Is there in the child's mind an order in which 
 the faculties develop? Should all children 
 then be taught the same things in the same 
 order or should each child come to its own in 
 its own way ? Should education equip the 
 child with knowledge, that is, facts, or with 
 20 
 
 Education 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 discipline, that is, training ? Is there an 
 order in which knowledges have worth, and 
 does this order correspond to the develop- 
 ment of faculties ? Is the educated man after 
 all better equipped for actual life than the 
 " self-made man " ? All these questions con- 
 verge to a single focus and have one answer, 
 if we can answer the all-embracing question, 
 " What is true education ? " For a true edu- 
 cation is in fact that which, keeping pace 
 with the general order of development of the 
 child-mind, answers the need of each child, 
 by giving facts in their true relations, know- 
 ledge disciplined into wisdom, in the order in 
 which knowledges are of most worth, and 
 thus affording all, and more than, the advan- 
 tages of the self-made man, without waste 
 and loss. 
 
 At the age of maturity, Nature notifies 
 by certain external signs that sexuality, hith- The Facul- 
 erto passive, has become active. None the o^Age* 16 
 less the several faculties, intellectual as well 
 as physical and moral, have their times when 
 they come of age. Nature provides for de- 
 velopment of the child in due order, and a 
 true education follows Nature's order. To 
 blunt Nature's keenness, and to thwart her 
 methods, — as to teach grammar before lan- 
 
 21 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 guage, — is the greatest mistake possible to 
 education and " civilization," the sin against 
 the holy spirit of child-life. We find that 
 faculties develop in the child-mind in due 
 order, an order uniform in succession though 
 not parallel in time, and of consistent and ra- 
 tional evolution, in the case of every child, not 
 bereft of its complement of senses and facul- 
 ties, born into the world. The child asks in 
 succession "What?" "How?" "Why?" — 
 the question of fact, the question of relation, 
 the question of cause. None of us indeed live 
 What, How, long enough to know all the " What ? " but 
 Why ? it is not long before the child begins to ask 
 
 " How ? " and to learn of method and rela- 
 tion. At last it asks " Why ? " and begins 
 to learn of cause. " What is it ? " " What is 
 it like ? " "What made it ? " are the child's 
 touchstones. The basis of intellectual edu- 
 cation is, in this sense also, physical educa- 
 tion : the senses, not the reason, are first 
 called upon ; the first requisite is that the 
 child shall see, hear, touch, taste, smell, i. e. y 
 observe truly. This truth of sense-observa- 
 tion, in itself a moral education, becomes in 
 due course accuracy of thought-observation, 
 in obtaining and coordinating the data for 
 sound judgment, — so that the early need of 
 
 22 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 the child is also the final need of the man of 
 large affairs, in business organization or in 
 concerns of state. 
 
 The child, like the man, needs facts first. 
 Facts are the food, the fuel of the mind. The Storing 
 The engine must carry its store of coal, of of Facts 
 water, of oil : otherwise its direction is of no 
 avail. A wise teaching selects facts, sup- 
 plies more facts, and puts them in proper 
 relation. These facts, the child compares, 
 by likeness and difference, associates, assim- 
 ilates, organizes — until in this very setting 
 forth of related facts in due order, the mind 
 is trained to reproduce them in like related 
 order as material for new judgments. The 
 " meaning " of facts becomes evident. In 
 due course the senses are supplemented by 
 " instruments : " the eye is trained to keen 
 distinctions of color and tint by help of prism 
 and color-films, the ear by tuning-fork and 
 water-glasses. Facts are put together and 
 taken apart : synthesis and analysis prove 
 each other. In this way, facts are not 
 dumped into the brain as a heap of rubbish — 
 nor is the child required to swallow diction- 
 ary or directory, to clutter the brain-chambers 
 with useless knowledge, as names of forgotten 
 kings, days of battles, numbers of troops. 
 23 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 To the mind as to the body, that food should 
 be supplied which can be properly digested. 
 Nature invites this method of learning by 
 Learning by association — it is her method. The domain 
 of knowledge, the kingdom of Nature, is an 
 organized kingdom — ordered, coordinated : 
 not, as childhood used to be taught, a scrap- 
 heap of facts. One thing not only follows 
 another, but follows from another. Beasts, 
 birds, fishes, and plants, sounds and colors, 
 have correlations within and across their 
 kingdoms ; the mental process of organization 
 finds correspondence in nature. The child 
 no longer need learn a hundred names of 
 fishes, a hundred of birds, a hundred of 
 beasts, as isolated facts ; it can be taught, in 
 half the time, how the fish, developing after 
 its kind into many kinds, in likeness and un- 
 likeness, develops presently into the bird, 
 and this into the beast, the mammalia, man ; 
 and as the learning mind itself develops into 
 adult life, it is brought face to face with that 
 wonderful and culminating fact in biology, 
 that each human life in its pre-natal history 
 follows the same order. Thus knowledge is 
 taught by that principle of association which 
 is the primal law of memory. To fit a newly 
 seen bird or plant into its place is to know it 
 24 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 better than by name. As, in the words of 
 Agassiz and Goode, a great museum is a col- 
 lection of labels illustrated by specimens, so 
 a well-educated intelligence is a collection 
 of mental relations illustrated by individual 
 facts. Thus, though knowledges increase, 
 mastery of them is easier, because the key of 
 the treasure-house is one key, not many keys. 
 Classification is the labor-saving tool of the 
 mind. Thus knowledge of facts becomes 
 disciplined into wisdom, good sense. And 
 the pupil of to-day learns more, in less time, 
 with half labor, than the child of the genera- 
 tion addressed by Herbert Spencer's book on 
 " Education." 
 
 In the memory-chambers of the brain, the 
 senses in fact store impressions, one by one, Memory 
 until these senso-graphs rival the collections l ^X^f xzzX 
 of a great library, gallery, and museum. Each 
 collection starts with a few things. As books 
 begin to come into a library, they may be put 
 upon the shelves as they happen to come. 
 But presently, as more come, there must be 
 arrangement — the librarian can no longer 
 put his hand upon each book separately. If 
 he has had no library education, he may put 
 together all the books whose titles begin with 
 "A," "An," or "The." Or, he may try a 
 25 
 
tion 
 
 THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 more sensible alphabetizing by titles, without 
 these meaningless tags. Or, he may arrange 
 his books according to the names of authors. 
 But, if he is to have a real working-library — 
 one where people come not to " get a book " 
 but to get knowledge — he finds he must 
 Classifica- have a classification by subjects, either di- 
 rectly on his shelves, or indirectly in a subject- 
 catalogue. Each subject becomes at last a 
 special library. Soon the librarian finds that 
 some books are out-of-date and seldom called 
 for. These he puts on less accessible shelves, 
 and brings to the front the " live " books, to 
 be of easy access to the seeker. Last year's 
 newspaper, the ephemeral book, is stowed 
 away out of sight and "out of mind." Col- 
 lection becomes but a means for selection. 
 At last, the great library, recognizing that 
 it can never be complete, supplements itself 
 by knowledge of other libraries, through cat- 
 alogues, bibliographies, indexes, — and its 
 final triumph, in the " evaluation " of books, 
 is to produce at once the best book of its 
 subject, or to tell where it can be had. 
 
 So in a well-ordered mind, the senses store 
 
 data, arranged by the method of association 
 
 in a subject-classification, and these can be 
 
 called for at will, combined and applied to 
 
 26 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 practical use. The brain is closely analogous The Brain a 
 to a photographer's store-room, connected Tl 1615 * 10 ??, 
 with a telephone " central." We know almost and Photo- 
 nothing of the physical nature of the brain ftoreUoom 
 senso-graphs, nor do we know the limits of 
 brain-capacity to receive and store such im- 
 pressions. The phrenologists assign specific 
 parts of the brain as the seat of specific func- 
 tions, and physiologists locate the nerve- 
 centres of the several senses ; but of the real 
 records in brain-cells, we are and may always 
 be ignorant. But we know that observation 
 and memory differ with individuals, with 
 ages, with specialization, above all with the 
 training that educes habit. One sees and 
 memorizes much ; another little. The child- 
 mind is of clear plates, sensitized by heredity 
 for this or that kind of impression ; the 
 matured mind takes and gives, washes out, 
 re-sensitizes ; the aged mind seems some- 
 times to lose control, and faded plates, long 
 since forgotten in the back store-rooms, come 
 out unbidden. One person observes and re- 
 members faces ; another names ; some both. 
 There is a natural selection : we remember 
 only for a day or a week what we had for 
 breakfast or dinner, but for years a face, a 
 voice, an odor, a kindling thought, a key-fact. 
 27 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 The memory becomes trained to forget some 
 things, to remember others. Education should 
 exercise this perspective, in the cultivation of 
 habit. The eye, the ear, the inward sense, 
 need to be trained to note, to consider, to 
 record, worthily. There should be inten- 
 tional differentiation between observing and 
 remembering. The modern newspaper makes 
 the mistake of attempting record of all the 
 pettinesses of a day — an impossible and 
 worthless task. The modern education must 
 see and shun this serious error. Selection, 
 not collection, should be its aim. 
 
 And in true education each life must be 
 Individual- trained after its own pattern. Each child 
 
 dren f Chil " has the ri g ht t0 be treated as itself » b Y parent 
 and by teacher. The farmer does not treat 
 alike potatoes, corn, wheat ; sheep, cow, 
 horse. The gardener will not bed together, 
 nor treat alike, his roses, his lilies, his or- 
 chids — nor will he treat alike one kind of 
 rose and another. Each must be nurtured 
 after its kind. But human seedlings do not 
 come to us ready-labeled, like pots from the 
 florist ; each life must be studied, to know 
 the needs of its own character. Nature 
 divines for us. In the light of general laws, 
 the law of each child's life — temperament, 
 28 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 tastes, capacities, trend — must be separately 
 discerned and studied. No two children, 
 born of the same parents, are the same, or 
 even alike, and this unlikeness is even more 
 marked in the school than in the family. 
 And throughout all education this unlikeness 
 in likeness must be kept in mind by the 
 teacher, in leading forth the faculties of the 
 taught. All teaching should be individual Teaching 
 in its personal application, though in its pur- fn^idual 
 pose the same. While children of the same 
 age study the same subject, as a part of gen- 
 eral education, each must do his part in his 
 own way. This the wise teacher, e-ducating, 
 recognizes. The " grade " system needs to 
 be tempered to individual temperaments. 
 Instead of putting into one class the boy of 
 ten who is eight years old for arithmetic and 
 twelve years old for spelling, and the boy of 
 ten who is eight for spelling and twelve for 
 arithmetic, a " class " for arithmetic, by due 
 arrangement of hours, should include those 
 of certain advancement in that study, what- 
 ever their mere age, and the grade certifi- 
 cate should be given for each study and not 
 by an impossible average which ignores 
 differences. To reduce a class to physical 
 uniformity by cutting the feet off tall boys 
 29 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 and making them foot-stools for the short 
 ones, would not be good practice. Natural 
 selection should here also be recognized and 
 emphasized ; and " over-education," that is, 
 mis-directed education, prevented. It is not 
 wise to try to grow a lily from a rose, nor a 
 rose from a lily. 
 
 Self-preservation "is the first law of 
 The Order nature," and next in order of need is self- 
 o Nee s maintenance, "earning a living." As the 
 family precedes and is the unit of the neigh- 
 borhood and the state, preparation for par- 
 entage, rearing a family, should be assured 
 before that for citizenship, the communal 
 and political relation. In some measure 
 Nature provides for all these in the instincts 
 of the animal kingdom. Last, and pecul- 
 iar to man, comes aesthetic development, for 
 the gratification of individual tastes. This, 
 Spencer shows, is the order in which know- 
 ledges are of most worth, an order which 
 schooling should regard in developing the 
 child into the man. And this is likewise the 
 order of a natural education, an education 
 following Nature and developing according 
 to her laws. 
 
 For the instincts of Nature, fulfilled by 
 30 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 a wise physical training, provide first for The Order 
 the preservation of life and health ; and for °. f Educa_ 
 the occupations of the great body of man- 
 kind, " manual training," the development 
 of bodily strength and skill, of the eye, the 
 hand, the physical powers, is now requisite ; 
 and all this is physical or sense-education. 
 Moral education must of course pervade all, 
 but it is of paramount necessity in the rela- 
 tions of parentage and citizenship, the home 
 and the state, in which the sense of right, 
 moral development, should be supreme. And 
 intellectual education, the storing and train- 
 ing of the mind, beginning in the first rela- 
 tions with elementary knowledge of natural 
 facts, and with the simpler processes by which 
 art supplements nature, as drawing, writing, 
 reading, measuring, figuring, — becomes of 
 increasing importance in the later relations, 
 with physiology, biology, sociology, philology, 
 history, politics, economics, psychology, phi- 
 losophy ; until, in final processes of culture, 
 it teaches not only science but the fine arts 
 which become personal "accomplishments" 
 and gratifications. Thus a true education 
 conforms in every respect with the several 
 orders of development — within the child's 
 mind, without in the requirements of life, 
 3i 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 answering to that evenness of supply and 
 demand with which Nature always balances 
 her books. It proceeds from the simple to 
 the complex, from the near to the far, from 
 the like to the unlike, from nature to art, in 
 the true procedure of the universal law of 
 development. 
 
 The basic education, of physical sound- 
 The Kinder- ness, moral rightness, and intellectual true- 
 garten ness j n p erce pti n of fact, is the field, after 
 
 the mother's care, of the " child-garden." 
 This supplements the care of parents, but 
 can never supplant it. Here Nature's meth- 
 ods of play and of imitation are used as the 
 royal road to learning. After the nursery 
 comes thus the kindergarten, in which, in the 
 sunshine of play, the human plant is to grow. 
 The kindergartner sees in the child literally 
 a plant that is to be brought to flower. All 
 plants need light, warmth, air, water, soil — 
 the kindergarten recognizes that the light of 
 truth, the warmth of love, must come to the 
 unfolding of the little life. The true pur- 
 pose of the kindergarten is to put the child 
 in touch with Nature ; to let Nature take it 
 by the hand and lead it forth, each little life 
 after its own order of being or temperament ; 
 to encourage the small seeker after truth to 
 32 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 ask questions of Nature and listen to the an- 
 swers for itself. It is at once a praise of the 
 kindergarten and a criticism of the " graded 
 school," that the too methodic teacher con- 
 siders the child of the kindergarten too prone 
 to ask questions, too individual, not readily 
 "drilled," " uneasy under school rote." But, 
 on the other hand, the kindergarten is not 
 merely for play, or a place where the child 
 is to "have its own way." It must, above 
 all, learn Nature's way, kind but also just, 
 sweet but also stern, by no means "go as you 
 please." So, in the games patterning real 
 life, in drawing, modeling, weaving, basket- 
 work, in the song that tells its story or points 
 its clear but unobtrusive moral, the child 
 must be getting not only simple knowledge 
 and simple skill, but that moral discipline cari- 
 catured in the makeshift of "drilling." As a 
 "fad," without high purpose and sound method, 
 the kindergarten is a caricature of education. 
 That play is in itself natural education, and 
 can be made the greatest of aids in teaching, The Teach- 
 is one of the most important discoveries in mg ° ay 
 the history of educational development, — 
 the great contribution of Froebel. Nature's 
 indications are often given in the child's own 
 choice of play, for true play patterns the real 
 33 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 affairs of life, with happy instinct, and gives 
 a real education. The simplest games of 
 children are well-nigh universal, found the 
 world around, passing from one child-genera- 
 tion to another, without written record or 
 purposed teaching, as the Vedic hymns or 
 the epics of Homer were passed on in the 
 childhood of the world. The ball, the top, 
 Toys the hoop, all are object-lessons in the proper- 
 
 ties of matter and the laws of motion, giving 
 in happy play dexterity to hand and accuracy 
 to eye, and laying the foundation for a later 
 knowledge of the science of motion. The 
 reins, the toy-wagon, the miniature boat or 
 locomotive, are means of unconscious train- 
 ing. The boy's knife, the girl's scissors, 
 the box of tools, are an introduction to prac- 
 tical mechanics. The doll is a lesson in the 
 altruism of motherhood. Presently the child 
 begins to collect, and a collection of kinds 
 of leaves, of woods, of insects, of feathers, 
 of birds, of minerals, of postage-stamps, of 
 coins, becomes to the keen parent, the alert 
 teacher, a royal road to botany, to zoology, to 
 geology, to geography, to history. Here, as 
 elsewhere, Nature points the best way, and 
 the easiest way. In choosing his play, the 
 lad indicates the " calling " Nature gives 
 34 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 him. And if, by wise sympathy of parent 
 and teacher, honor, fairness, kindness, manli- 
 ness, are made part of the public opinion of 
 children in play, "honor bound" and "no 
 fair " become watchwords in life as well, and 
 a solid foundation is laid for the civic virtues 
 most needed in business and in the state. 
 
 The child who, in the kindergarten, has 
 learned to use touch, sight, hearing, rightly ; " Primary 
 to speak carefully ; to do simple handy work, uca lon 
 as in modeling, drawing, and weaving; to 
 play wholesomely, — has the first and best 
 outfit for human life, though he has not yet 
 learned his letters. For these are but the 
 symbols needed to record his thoughts and 
 his speech. Mankind thought and talked 
 before it wrote and read ; so also in the child 
 — use, art, comes before rule, science. It 
 is later in the years of training that the child- 
 mind should attempt to master the artificial 
 features necessary in education. To read, to 
 spell, to write, are not natural endowments, 
 but artificial acquirements. The child draws, 
 makes pictures of objects, naturally ; but the 
 degenerate pictures now arbitrary letters, 
 conventionally associated with sounds, have 
 no longer relation with natural objects and 
 35 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 can be learned only " by rote." These let- 
 ters mastered, the child applies them phoneti- 
 cally, but must be " corrected " backwards to 
 Learning the arbitrary idiosyncrasies of English or- 
 Enghsh thoepy and orthography. Of all tongues, 
 English is perhaps the least logical, and its 
 " rules " in grammar are in great part an ef- 
 fort to classify arbitrary and unrelated facts. 
 Reading, writing, and spelling can indeed be 
 learned in English, not in scientific analysis, 
 but only as a hard-and-fast act of memory. 
 Yet when the elements of orthoepy and or- 
 thography are acquired, there is then a natu- 
 ral way of development in unison, as each 
 learner in turn reads while others write and 
 perforce spell. Grammar comes last of all. 
 It may be that the typewriter and some form 
 of phonography will find place in our schools ; 
 the Morse signs can be learned as play, 
 and the phonetic symbols of Bell's "visible 
 speech," the only alphabet logical and natu- 
 ral, give a remarkable discriminative power 
 in hearing and recording language, even of 
 unknown tongues. Likewise in the field of 
 mathematics, arithmetic and algebra, both ar- 
 tificial forms of numerical expression, pro- 
 perly follow instead of preceding the more 
 natural geometry. 
 
 36 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 Each child should receive, in each period 
 of schooling, "an all-round education," com- An Educa- 
 plete so far as it goes, so that no time or S e c °™f~ ar 
 force has been lost or wasted when the child, as it goes 
 at any age, is withdrawn from school to ac- 
 tive or passive life. And the order of studies 
 indicated by the order of evolution of facul- 
 ties still proves the same as the order of com- 
 parative usefulness ; development continues 
 to answer to need. In any stage of civiliza- 
 tion all need, first of all, to observe, to think, 
 to talk ; next, to read, to write, to measure, 
 and to reckon. The child should be taught 
 first the prime facts nearest home, in nature 
 or in history, and as it learns to use tools — 
 whether figures, words, or things — should 
 master the simple before passing to the com- 
 plex. The prime factors in every-day rela- 
 tions of adult life with Nature and with affairs, 
 with other men and in personal conduct, 
 America plans to give to every child, within 
 the years of compulsory education. Statute 
 law, making sure that the child of ignorant 
 or heedless or selfish parents shall not lose 
 the chance it can have only once in life, pro- 
 vides this primary education for all children, 
 and " compels them to come in." 
 
 Now the human being has the tools of 
 37 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 The larger knowledge, so that it can work its way into 
 Knowledge i ar g er knowledge. These avenues of elemen- 
 tary education lead forward and open upward 
 for the fit student ; and our free high schools 
 and colleges should give to the youth who by 
 proof of fitness earns the right of way, those 
 opportunities for which he cannot yet pay 
 except in promise of future service, but which 
 if the door is not thus opened must be lost. 
 
 Education 
 
 Primary education is that of primary, of 
 ^Secondary universal, importance. A less number of 
 children are sure of the next advantage, sec- 
 ondary education, which is of secondary im- 
 portance — the widening of the horizon of 
 the individual mind by the teaching of facts 
 outside the individual experience and there- 
 fore to be had only through books or lectures : 
 the knowledge of other lands, physical and 
 descriptive geography ; of other times, his- 
 tory, not in dates and names, but of vital 
 facts ; of the wider facts of nature ; of other 
 languages. This is properly "common- 
 school education," and most if not all chil- 
 dren should have it, with the extension of 
 that manual training which gives to the body 
 parallel development of knowledge and disci- 
 pline. 
 
 38 
 
Education " 
 
 OF EDUCATION 
 
 After this, and only after this, comes the 
 " higher education," in high schools and col- '^Higher 
 leges, t which fewer children can have, for 
 which many children have little capacity and 
 little need, which consists largely in the 
 analysis and generalization of facts into 
 knowledge of the general underlying laws, 
 the science underneath the art, as the rules 
 of grammar and the equations of analytical 
 mechanics. The higher studies, in which 
 the larger generalizations marshal innumer- 
 able facts, otherwise useless in their isolation, 
 into sequence and order, under the rule of 
 the greater laws, afford the final discipline of 
 the scholar. Key-facts, opening vast cham- 
 bers of knowledges, are stored in the well- 
 ordered mind ; no one can ever master all the 
 books in a great library, but the student be- 
 comes trained to know where and how to get 
 what he wants. History, seen as sociology, 
 in its great sweep of progress through the 
 ages, has its mile-posts : we do not need to 
 measure foot by foot. Biology, the study of 
 life, has its great law of evolution : physics, 
 the study of forces, has its great law of cor- 
 relation and conversion ; each of the great 
 realms of thought is illumined by the light 
 of greater law. This is still general educa- 
 
 . 39 
 
Specialized 
 Education 
 
 Elective 
 Studies 
 
 THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 tion, in which, while the individual tempera- 
 ment of the child or youth must be consid- 
 ered, in method and practice, the purpose of 
 the teacher is to impart an all-round acquaint- 
 ance with the general field of knowledge, so 
 far as the pupil goes. 
 
 Last of all, for the fit, should come the 
 specialized education, the trade-school for the 
 artisan, the art-school for the artist, the dis- 
 tinctive school in the university for the stu- 
 dent aiming at a profession. The special 
 must be built on the broad foundations of 
 the general, both in knowledge and in train- 
 ing. 
 
 With specialization, the principle of " elec- 
 tion " of studies comes into play — and not 
 before. The college, whether called academy 
 or " university," has for its business, to teach 
 as far as may be "something about every- 
 thing," that the youth may be prepared to 
 touch life on all sides and in any calling ; the 
 special school, in the university proper, to 
 teach as fully as may be " everything about 
 something," that the man maybe specialized 
 for his specific work in life. Thus, the col- 
 lege professor of chemistry teaches his sub- 
 ject as a part of general education, the typi- 
 cal facts and general laws which every one 
 40 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 should know, the merchant in dealing with 
 products, the lawyer in dealing with cases, 
 the preacher in dealing with analogies ; the 
 university professor of chemistry teaches his 
 subject as a specialty, that his student may 
 become a chemist or apply chemistry as a 
 physician or a mining engineer. It is not 
 until the student has rounded general educa- 
 tion as a college "graduate" that he is best 
 qualified to make choice of " elective studies." 
 Otherwise, he voyages on unexplored seas 
 without chart or compass, steering as best he 
 can. A premature choice elects not between Premature 
 specialties of knowledges but between " softs Choice 
 and hards," as when " patristic Greek " at 
 Harvard was taken not by budding theolo- 
 gians but by those who " went in " for athlet- 
 ics. But when the college has "graduated" 
 the youth into manhood and made him ready 
 to accept the responsibility of choice and 
 life-aim, selection should be invited, not only 
 of studies but of teachers, as in the German 
 universities. The "born teacher," answer- 
 ing to the need of each child, whom children 
 "love to hear," should indeed be selected 
 throughout the common schools as well as 
 for the kindergarten and the university, but 
 it is only as we reach the latter that so far it 
 41 
 
Education 
 tested by- 
 Results 
 
 Culture 
 
 THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 has been safe to give natural selection by 
 students' choice free play. 
 
 Our "higher education" should produce 
 definite results in higher morals and higher 
 character, and it is self-impeached when it 
 gives us tricksters or hoodlums. The happy 
 effervescence of young manhood has need to 
 bubble itself off in sports and fun, but the 
 self-restraint which comes with the true dis- 
 cipline of the scholar should prevent that 
 over-stepping of the bounds of sanity and 
 decency which gives to common uneducated 
 brutality an example and excuse. The stu- 
 dent body in our upper schools should be 
 self-organized, self -governed, under restraint 
 of its own public opinion, alert to the respon- 
 sibilities of an aristocracy of scholarship, and 
 thus prepared to bring into the body politic, 
 year by year, clean, new blood capable of the 
 highest service to the democracy from which 
 its opportunity has come. 
 
 The final education completes the whole 
 man, with the " culture " which is as the 
 flower to the fruit, the delight side of life, 
 literature, music, art, the enjoyment of Na- 
 ture. Here also the faculties are to be led 
 forth, e-ducated, trained, to fullness of appre- 
 ciation, an appreciation not of technical skill, 
 42 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 as when a painter admires the handling of 
 a pigment, but of qualities of inspiration. 
 This makes of life a garden in which, after 
 the work-a-day toil of the field, there is 
 rest. 
 
 But " schooling " is not all of education. 
 All life is education — outside of school and All Life is 
 after school-days as well. The example of Education 
 parents, the influence of companions, the 
 abiding bonds of friendship, the touch-and- 
 pass of incidental acquaintanceship, are all 
 agencies of unconscious education through- 
 out our lives. But on the men and women 
 of education there is laid a duty of conscious 
 education, of cultivating the art and the arts 
 of life, that should lead them and those with 
 them upon ever higher planes of knowledge 
 and discipline and character. The state 
 recognizes this in providing the public li- 
 brary, which shall supplement and extend 
 through adult life the opportunities of the 
 school. But it is above all for the scholar, 
 self-impelled, to develop his individual life, 
 and thus his part of the common life, in full 
 responsiveness to everything that is highest 
 in life, " to hitch his wagon to a star," to find 
 in affairs, in social life, in politics, in religion, 
 alike, at once opportunity to apply all with 
 
 43 
 
THE ARTS OF LIFE 
 
 The Self- 
 educated 
 
 Rest and 
 Re-creation 
 
 which life has endowed him and new endow- 
 ment for life to come. 
 
 It should put to shame those who have 
 enjoyed and not fulfilled the opportunities 
 of schooling and the discipline of education 
 that men and women, denied these opportu- 
 nities and this discipline, have often devel- 
 oped by the education of daily life a standard 
 of noble character and uplifted living, far 
 above that of many who have wasted their 
 talents and belittled themselves. There 
 have been artists who, lacking hands, have 
 drawn pictures with their toes ; there are 
 workers who, lacking tools, have overcome 
 all disadvantages, made their own tools, and 
 achieved their perfect work. All honor to 
 such as these ! but let us not argue that lack 
 of education, of hands, or of tools, has made 
 them what they are. 
 
 In education, for the youth and through 
 adult-life as well, a great factor is rest and 
 re-creation. Our busy age neglects what it 
 most needs. We have gone daft for amuse- 
 ment — it is a vice of the times ; but that is 
 not re-creation. Nor is idleness, rest. Here 
 also the happy mean is between the extreme 
 which we reject and the extreme to which 
 our pendulum swings. The victim of " cram," 
 
 44 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 with head-splitting ache and eyes red from 
 the blood-congestion in his brain, his head in 
 a towel and his feet in hot water, is no worse 
 and no better than the hero of sport, his 
 head cracked by blow or kick and with black 
 eye and bruised body from the athletic field. 
 We need to learn to rest. For we of to-day 
 not only " murder sleep," but murder waking 
 rest. The diversion of our busy thoughts 
 into quiet is an unknown art. We cannot 
 fold our hands or infold our spirits with 
 quiet. The art of rest must be one of our 
 educative arts of life. 
 
 Thus in education, the law of Nature holds. 
 Each right step, in the individual life, is Harmony 
 found to be in harmony with the great laws ca < tion EdU " 
 of the universe. All is in tune. Education 
 has been so wrong in the past, so far from 
 Nature's way, especially in its relations with 
 democracy, that to many there is despair 
 as to right education. But it is only within 
 the past generation that mankind has reached 
 that place in progress where real education 
 is rightly discerned. Our progress since has 
 been indeed wonderful and encouraging. 
 Let us not fail of heart in this work for the 
 future. 
 
 45 
 
THE SCHOLAR 1 
 
 AM to say some words on behalf 
 of Alpha Delta Phi ; and because 
 Alpha Delta Phi is meant to be 
 a brotherhood of scholars, I ask 
 leave to speak of " The Making 
 of the Scholar, and the Use of Him." For 
 this Fraternity, uniting in its chain of chap- 
 ters the men of many colleges, is purposed 
 to help other college influences in making true 
 scholars and in inspiring true scholarship to be 
 of use afterward in the world. 
 
 This city is dear to it because here rests one 
 A true true scholar, the founder of this Fraternity, 
 
 Scholar Samuel Eells. His grave is a shrine to the 
 men, now five thousand and more in active life, 
 who know what his life meant, and means. It 
 was a short life, it was not a famous life, but 
 it was a life that has continued and has mul- 
 tiplied its influence all these years since he 
 died. It is one of the lives which show us 
 
 1 Address on " The Making of the Scholar and the Use 
 of Him," at the Fifty-first Annual Convention of Alpha 
 Delta Phi, Cleveland, O., May 16, 1883 ; reprinted from the 
 " Star and Crescent," June, 1883, omitting some passages 
 specific to the occasion. 
 
 46 
 
THE SCHOLAR 
 
 that some things which are entirely true in 
 science are not true, are not adequate, in the 
 higher life. In nature, force cannot beget 
 force greater than itself. But in human lives, 
 how great, how infinite, is the force one vital- 
 izing, inspiring life can radiate into other 
 lives. There is a little book, an Alpha Delta 
 Phi book, which tells this story well, and those 
 of you who have read " Ten Times One is Ten 
 Ten," a book whose wide and widening influ- Times 0ne 
 ence is the best fulfillment of its own playful 
 prophecy, may well have thought back beyond 
 Harry Wadsworth, its hero, beyond our bro- 
 ther Edward Everett Hale, its author, to our 
 elder brother, Samuel Eells, who fell asleep 
 quietly, after his short life, with little thought 
 of the breadth and scope of his work, with 
 little knowledge of the inspiration this one 
 modest planning of his was to be to the 
 thousands of men who were to honor him in 
 his grave. I call him above all a true scholar 
 because he had the faith, that work tells, 
 which nature teaches the scholar ; and the 
 hope which the far vision that looks beyond 
 the discouragements of to-day opens to the 
 scholar ; and the loving-kindness to his fel- 
 lows that belongs also to true scholarship. 
 
 47 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 All this he meant by Alpha Delta Phi. All 
 this we are to mean by Alpha Delta Phi. And 
 I think I cannot better honor his memory, 
 and speak more fittingly in this place, than by 
 asking you to consider with me the scholar, 
 and how we are to get him, and how we are 
 to use him. 
 
 Who and what is the scholar ? He is the 
 The man — or the woman — who has been able to 
 
 Possession ac ^ t ^ ie knowledge and the experience of many 
 lives to the little knowledge and the little ex- 
 perience any one short life can win for itself. 
 Indeed no child is born which is not indebted 
 to father, to mother, to generations beyond, 
 to the whole world before him, for vast, uncon- 
 scious stores of life : always the present owes 
 to the past, its mother, a debt it can pay only 
 to the future, its child. But the scholar ob- 
 tains, consciously, an over-share of this world- 
 experience, and with it responsibility for his 
 privilege. For generations past, and in many 
 lands, the scholars who have been before him 
 have been smelting and refining from crass ig- 
 norance and crude fact the riches of know- 
 ledge which are his fair possession. And with 
 him the scholars of his own day, his every-day 
 48 
 
THE SCHOLAR 
 
 teachers, "passing along the torch one to 
 another," labor to show him how best to use, 
 to apply, these riches, to turn mere money of 
 knowledge into realized and productive wealth. 
 I wish to say this in the plainest English and 
 without metaphor : The difference between 
 the educated and the uneducated men, who 
 start even, is that the one has got into the 
 working forces of his life the real value of 
 what other men have found out about nature, 
 and about human kind, and about life in gen- 
 eral, and that the other has painfully to get 
 such little as he can for himself. 
 
 I say, you will please note, "who start 
 even." For the mistake is a common one of Starting 
 comparing the uneducated man of self-con- even 
 tained vigor and stout common sense with 
 the fool or weakling on whom education has 
 been thrown away. I shook hands at church 
 the other day with a negro, who had been a 
 slave, who had not learned his letters till after 
 the war, who had educated himself, and who 
 had come North to plead the cause of an edu- 
 cational work for his own people, of which he 
 was the head. In five minutes he told his 
 story, and when he stood at the door, hat in 
 hand, as he was not ashamed to do, his hat 
 was filled. I had listened not long before to 
 49 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 What 
 Education 
 cannot do 
 
 a bishop, coming from a missionary field, a 
 man of education, who had to tell one of the 
 noblest stories that can be told, the work of a 
 man at an outpost of religion and of civiliza- 
 tion ; and he droned ineffective platitudes for 
 near an hour — and got nothing, it may be. 
 It was the slave and not the bishop who de- 
 served honor — who deserved it all the more 
 from educated men, from scholars, because of 
 the plucky fight he had made against all ob- 
 stacles, to obtain such education as he could 
 for himself. If this were fair test for the 
 scholar, education had the worst of it. But 
 it was not. Nature had done more for the 
 slave than education could do for the bishop. 
 There is an impression too common among 
 certain classes, that scholarship produces a 
 moral or intellectual dry-rot. If that is the 
 general effect of education, education is a bad 
 thing. But it is not fair to judge a calling 
 from its failures, nor to impeach scholarship 
 from Bachelors of Arts in whom the spirit 
 of scholarship can prove an alibi. Nothing 
 more can be said for education than that it 
 helps out — leads out, as the word implies — 
 what there is in a man : it cannot put brains 
 into him. It cannot grow stores of wheat 
 from soil of stone ; though it may better poor 
 50 
 
THE SCHOLAR 
 
 soil and make good soil productive many fold. 
 But if, taking two boys of equal capacity at 
 fourteen, you will set the one to the old- 
 fashioned, orthodox training of sweeping out 
 the merchant's store, and will give the other 
 five years of sound education, you will find 
 the educated man at twenty-one catching up 
 and at twenty-five going ahead of his less 
 fortunate fellow. The scholar, truly defined, 
 is the man to whose original capacity educa- 
 tion has added knowledge, training, an experi- 
 ence beyond his years. 
 
 The making of the scholar, then, is one 
 of the highest tasks to which society can set The 
 itself. It is the glory of America that it J^ sSfolL 
 has built the base broadly. We have come 
 to question the glowing generality of the De- 
 claration of Independence, that all men are 
 created equal ; but the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence has meant to us that America should 
 do her best to provide that, aside from the in- 
 equalities of birth, of position and of riches, 
 every child shall have the best chance possible 
 for an equal common school education. We 
 have, indeed, been much in the dark about 
 early education, as we have been much in the 
 dark about many things, but a scholar among 
 scholars, Herbert Spencer, has been fore- 
 5i 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 Early most in leading us out into the daylight of 
 
 common sense. We find that those things 
 which the child can learn earliest and easiest 
 are the things which every child most needs 
 to know. We begin to see that curious, talk- 
 ative, imitative childhood, question-asking but 
 grammar-hating which used to be connected 
 with original sin, is prompted by Nature, best 
 and most blessed of teachers, thus to find out 
 how to observe accurately — " the lead pencil 
 is the best microscope," said Agassiz, and 
 children delight to draw ; how to think fully ; 
 how to talk clearly, and so to write and to 
 read, which are prime factors of scholarship 
 as well as first outfit for those to whom 
 further privileges are denied. So, as we fol- 
 low Nature, presently we find that many 
 things have been learned which we did not 
 know we were teaching. And many bug- 
 bears disappear, especially the fear that there 
 are nowadays so many things to know that 
 there is not time enough to teach them ; 
 though, to quote Emerson's "Red Jacket," 
 we have " all the time there is." Nature, we 
 find, has arranged these things for us ; these 
 new knowledges lead one into another, as 
 each link in a great chain fits with its neigh- 
 bor ; if we learn Nature's book in the right 
 52 
 
THE SCHOLAR 
 
 order, the most difficult pages become easy in 
 the light of those we have learned before. 
 Thus the boy of fourteen may know more, 
 with less work, with less wear and tear, than 
 the boy of sixteen in the " golden days " we 
 sigh for. When the engineers opened across 
 the mountains the great iron ways that unite 
 the East and the West, they followed Nature's 
 guidance, in the streams, as far as she would 
 lead them ; it was only when these clues failed 
 that they rapped at the closed doors of the top- 
 most places and broke their way through the 
 rock. To borrow the engineer's language, we 
 are beginning to educate in the lines of least 
 resistance. 
 
 This gives a great advantage in our day for 
 the making of the scholar. The boy comes The College 
 to the college better equipped — so soon, at Functlon 
 least, as the middle schools respond, as they 
 have not yet fully responded, to the progress 
 above and below them — and the college, re- 
 lieved of some of its old work, knows better 
 what, when and how to teach him. More- 
 over, the college is beginning to know better 
 its own province, which is to make the stu- 
 dent a scholar, and not, as is the province of 
 the university, a specialist. For the scholar 
 is, in the old phrase, a man of parts, and not 
 53 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 a partisan ; not the narrow man who has only 
 one side to him and can look at affairs only 
 from one point of view. Therefore, his busi- 
 ness is to become a rounded man, who touches 
 knowledge at all points of the compass. To 
 produce such men, the college must recognize 
 and accept its proper function, and not ape 
 the university, with its quite different func- 
 tion — more specific, less wide. The graduate 
 of a college should be a man, knowing the 
 knowledges, knowing himself, fitted to play 
 well whatever may be his part in life. Being 
 thus a scholar, he goes from the college to the 
 university, if he is to be a "professional " man 
 — and the professions now include many 
 specialties — to train himself for his special 
 part. 
 
 There has been in this country an unfortu- 
 College nate confusion between these two functions, 
 sitv Umver- and many colleges have done harm to them- 
 selves and to their cause by calling themselves 
 universities when they are not universities. 
 The university may include a college, but 
 as a university it is other than a college. 
 We need many colleges ; we can have but 
 a few worthy universities. The university 
 should be a great center of intellectual life, 
 where in great libraries and with great col- 
 54 
 
THE SCHOLAR 
 
 lections and under the specific guidance of University- 
 great specialists, the few men may prepare ment l0P " 
 themselves to know all there is to be known 
 about the one thing they make their life- 
 work, be it theology, or law, or medicine, or 
 philosophy, or electricity, or the investiga- 
 tion of Nature in any of her phases, infinitely 
 many, yet each infinitely great. This is a 
 privilege not for all men or for all scholars ; 
 society does not need that all should be in 
 this sense specialists. But the college is for 
 every man — every man who can ought to go 
 to college ; and the college and its graduates 
 must count it a privilege and a pleasure to bid 
 God-speed to the university. In our city of 
 New York, the trustees of Columbia are at 
 last doing what they should to make this 
 magnificently dowered home of learning a uni- 
 versity worthy of the name and worthy of the 
 metropolis it should adorn ; I take it that my 
 own college, supported as it is by the city of 
 New York, should look with no jealousy, but 
 with sincere congratulations, upon the devel- 
 opment at the hands of private citizens of a 
 great university, which shall relieve it of a 
 task it ought not, perhaps, to undertake, and 
 shall offer to its graduates the advantages 
 they have had to deny themselves or to seek 
 55 
 
Courses 
 
 OF EDUCATION 
 
 in other places or in other lands. And we look 
 to the great West, multiplying its colleges, to 
 concentrate on its universities, that Harvard 
 and Yale and Columbia and Cornell and Johns 
 Hopkins may find, not many and weak imi- 
 tators, but friendly rivals sufficiently few to 
 match their present or prospective strength. 
 If then it is for the university, to quote 
 Elective again an oft-quoted phrase, to teach everything 
 about something and so make the specialist, 
 it is for the college to make the scholar by 
 teaching something about everything. In a 
 reasonable sense, this should be the scholar's 
 endowment of knowledge. Elective courses 
 have thus little, if any, place in the college, 
 while the university course must be essentially 
 elective. A student must first learn the round 
 of the knowledges before he can decide what 
 particular knowledge is best to serve him : 
 and it is only the experts, the college faculty, 
 who can plan out for him what constitutes a 
 fair representation of the circle of knowledges. 
 "Will you then have smatterers ? " By no 
 means. If a man by learning much is to know 
 nothing, by doing many things indifferently 
 is to do nothing well, by becoming versatile is 
 also to become aimless — this is all bad, and 
 recklessly bad. This is the key, — that good 
 56 
 
THE SCHOLAR 
 
 teaching is not a matter of quantity but of The Round 
 quality ; not so much of what is taught as of ° e( j~e° W " 
 how it is taught. No man can know his mother 
 tongue fairly without knowing something of its 
 mother tongue and of its grandmother tongue; 
 and to drop Greek, that fine flower of exact 
 speech, out of the curriculum, is to leave edu- 
 cation incomplete. But we don't want a boy 
 to learn only Greek and not English; or only 
 language and not nature and the mathematics 
 and the laws of reason. For each study offers 
 some useful specialty of training, and throws 
 light upon some other, and cross-questions 
 some other, and makes the others more easy 
 to learn ; so that at last with a curriculum 
 approximating our fuller knowledge, we have 
 learned more in less time. When the student 
 is sent to Plato and his dialogues of Socrates, 
 let him take his logic also with him, and while 
 he admires the purity of Plato's Greek and the 
 loftiness of Socrates' philosophy, let him not 
 fail on the other hand to cross-examine the dear 
 old philosopher out of the brazen effrontery 
 with which he sets up his men of straw to 
 give him ready-made answers. 
 
 For thus knowledge becomes wisdom. The 
 two are not the same. Knowledge is but 
 the raw material of wisdom : and it is the fur- 
 57 
 
Training 
 
 Student 
 Self-gov- 
 ernment 
 
 OF EDUCATION 
 
 ther business of the college in the making of 
 the scholar to teach him to apply his know- 
 ledge, to be wise. This is training. And 
 much training has been denied to college stu- 
 dents by the wrong theory of college work 
 arid college government that has prevailed. 
 A college student must learn to think for 
 himself : this is what a man must do — and 
 where shall the man learn if not in college, and 
 how shall he learn if not by practice ! Fore- 
 most in my own college I honor that instruc- 
 tor who once gave up a full hour's " recita- 
 tion" that a single student might "think 
 out," aloud, to the benefiting of the class, a 
 mathematical axiom he made bold to question. 
 Here was a true teacher, who knew that one 
 truth thus thoroughly thought into the mind 
 developed an activity and avidity in learning 
 beyond weeks of text-books glibly recited off 
 by rote. The one is cramming and dyspep- 
 sia ; the other is the sound digestion of know- 
 ledge into wisdom. 
 
 The like is true in college government. 
 Here are young men, approaching voting age, 
 who are expected presently not only to gov- 
 ern themselves but to help to govern a coun- 
 try. Yet we police them under a paternal 
 and despotic government, and teach them 
 58 
 
THE SCHOLAR 
 
 trickery and riot and rebellion. I remember 
 when in my own college days some few of us 
 undertook, in honesty and good faith, to or- 
 ganize some measures of student self-govern- 
 ment, the Jovian wrath with which our un- 
 meant treason was visited by our president ; 
 and his sentence upon myself was the denial 
 of my Phi Beta Kappa key until the proffer of 
 it came too late. It is one of the great strides 
 in American colleges in the past few years 
 that Amherst and others with her are teach- 
 ing their students to become good citizens by 
 requiring them to govern themselves. 
 
 But there is something more than rounded 
 knowledge, and something more than practi- Noblesse 
 cal wisdom, which goes to the making of the lge 
 scholar and which should be expected from 
 the college. I mean that inspiration of schol- 
 arship which should prove so strong a motive 
 force in after life. It is a question not of 
 matter, not of method, but of men. Every 
 college man ought to get it into his very sense 
 of scholarship that he is one "passing the 
 torch along " from the men before him to the 
 men after him, from the men above him to 
 the men below him. Privilege is responsi- 
 bility ; noblesse oblige. This cannot be taught 
 out of text-books ; it can be taught only by 
 59 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 The College the kindling lives of true men. It is here 
 President that the co u ege pres ident should find his 
 
 opportunity — not as constable, as chief of 
 detectives, as police justice in a community 
 of culprits, but as a man calling upon men for 
 their manhood. So Arnold of Rugby called 
 upon his sixth form : " When I have confi- 
 dence in the sixth form," he said, " there is 
 no post in England which I would exchange 
 for this; but if they do not support me I 
 must go." They did support him, always ; 
 men will always respond to a man. There is, 
 indeed, no place on this great earth where 
 that indefinite but efficient quality of man 
 which Emerson calls character so tells, as at 
 the head of such a congregation of bright, 
 ardent, receptive young men as constitutes a 
 college community in America. The college 
 president can no longer be a Dry-as-dust who 
 sees only through a microscope or a telescope, 
 and has no sympathetic vision for the life at 
 every-day focus about him. He must be a 
 living power, a fountain of force, inspiring his 
 faculty, winning for them the opportunity 
 to do their best, inspiring his students with 
 emulation of his own manhood. You will 
 think of many men of this kind — and of 
 many men of the other kind : the difference 
 60 
 
THE SCHOLAR 
 
 between a live college and a dead college, a 
 college that turns out live men or that turns 
 out animated corpses, is often the difference 
 between a man at the head and a dummy. 
 Scholarship should be an inspiration — and 
 there is no inspiration like a man ! 
 
 We have thus reviewed some of the fac- 
 tors in the making of the scholar. If I have The self- 
 seemed to make the tacit assumption that scholar 
 the scholar is solely the product of the col- 
 lege, let me here admit the exception which 
 illustrates the rule. All honor to the self- 
 made scholars, who have won for themselves, 
 with pains, the attainments we of the colleges 
 can less boast of, because we reached them 
 by the royal road. Honor everywhere to the 
 true scholar, honor the more to the scholar 
 who has attained per aspera astra ! 
 
 II 
 
 Given, then, that the scholar is produced, 
 wide of knowledge, " well informed," wise The Use of 
 with training, inspired to high motive — how e Scholar 
 shall we use him ? how, rather, shall he use 
 himself ? For the scholar should lead, not wait 
 to be led : it is for that he has been educated. 
 The gift is the call. In what field, to what 
 purpose, shall he who has this experience and 
 61 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 training and inspiration above most men be 
 expected to apply it ? If he does not apply 
 it, he is the waster of ten talents. There is 
 no intellectual crime greater than the blase 
 contemptuousness of the pseudo-scholar, who 
 will let the world go by, as ill as it will, and 
 bother himself in no wise about it. 
 
 The true use of the scholar, I take it, is not 
 The Scholar at all that he shall choose what is called a 
 the L racti " profession, but that in any calling he shall 
 show breadth of thought and trained efficiency 
 of practical work. For it is the scholar who 
 is truly the practical man. Fore-warned is 
 fore-armed : the knowledge he has gained of 
 what other people have done before him, in 
 affairs of state or in the happenings of every- 
 day life, is his safeguard against mistakes 
 he also would otherwise be making. The 
 most ^practical man in the world to-day is 
 the man whose experience is bounded by his 
 own horizon ; the farmer who won't cover his 
 hay when the signal service reports a storm, 
 because he don't yet see the rain-clouds in 
 his sky. There is no more curious misuse of 
 words than this phrase of " the practical man " 
 to designate the unpractical person who pre- 
 fers not to know what other people can teach 
 him. 
 
 62 
 
THE SCHOLAR 
 
 I think there is another sense in which the Limitations 
 scholar of to-day is practical — the willingness 
 to put aside the old questionings of the un- 
 questionable, to confess that certain problems 
 of metaphysics lie beyond the limits of human 
 reason. "Thus far and no farther shalt thou 
 go," he recognizes in psychology as well as in 
 Nature. Questions of nominalism have lost 
 interest for him. Of those mysteries which 
 transcend human reason he is content not to 
 reason. There is to him a certain significance 
 in those pleasantries of the past : " What is 
 mind ? No matter. What is matter ? Never 
 mind. If Bishop Berkeley says there is no 
 matter, then 't is no matter what Bishop Berke- 
 ley says." 
 
 He will not impeach the ego and deny iden- 
 tity, and float off in the dark without rudder Agnosti- 
 and compass for a journey through a universe €lsm 
 which may not, to him, exist. The human 
 mind, he sees, must accept as fact that to 
 space, to time, to matter, there must have 
 been beginning or no beginning, there must 
 be end or no end. One of these must be true ; 
 but neither can even be thought by the finite 
 mind. We will therefore not attempt to rea- 
 son of them, nor will we complain that the 
 universe was not made some other way in- 
 63 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 stead of this way, that evil combats good, that 
 man was not made perfect and complete. It 
 is this tendency of thought which produces 
 agnosticism, of which we hear so much. But 
 agnosticism must itself be tempered by the 
 scientific habit of mind, as it is applied to 
 these higher things. The agnostic cannot 
 be also the atheist : if he will not believe, he 
 cannot disbelieve. The humility of the true 
 The Humil- scholar must make him reverent before the 
 Scholar ° First Cause, the unknowable, the unthinkable : 
 he will do his best in the world he knows 
 without attempting to deny the Creator or 
 to play the Creator for himself. To search 
 into the created universe for the informing, the 
 helping, the bettering of his fellow-men is 
 still his chief business, and let him never for- 
 get that as the vision of the imagination in its 
 scientific use penetrates into the infinitely 
 little and sees with "the mind's eye" 'the 
 ethereal vibration and the final atom, so the 
 eye of faith, transcending reason but not de- 
 spising its analogies, may seek to look above 
 the clouds, toward the infinitely great, the 
 infinite beyond. 
 
 I should say, then, that the chief use of the 
 scholar is to apply the broad sight to every- 
 day affairs. This is his service to his race. 
 
 6 4 
 
THE SCHOLAR 
 
 The astronomer sits in his tower watching the Applica- 
 stars through the big eye of his telescope, scholar- 
 The great earth rolls him round : his tube ship 
 sweeps the universe. He is alone with the 
 stars ; he seems to have nothing to do with 
 his fellow-men. " What has he done for his 
 kind ? " What has he not done ? He has 
 taught us that " the world does move ; " he 
 has taught us also to detect adulterations in 
 our food when our grocer tries to cheat us. 
 The spectroscope and the polariscope with 
 which the scholar questions the far-off stars 
 are to-day every-day servants in the most 
 commonplace affairs of life — the preparation 
 of our food, the collection of revenue. The 
 Genius of electricity, like him of the Arabian 
 Nights, is bottled in a Faure accumulator, and 
 will presently have to do our bidding in run- 
 ning the sewing-machine or turning the spit. 
 Benjamin Franklin, bringing lightning from 
 the heavens with his child's toy and with his 
 lightning-rod protecting homes and churches, 
 is the abiding type of the scholar, hesitating 
 at nothing that he may serve his kind. 
 
 Whatever, then, be the calling of the 
 
 scholar, it is his business to be better of his 
 
 kind than the man who is not a scholar — the 
 
 broader clergyman, the truer lawyer, the 
 
 6 S 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 The Scholar keener doctor, the stronger teacher, the more 
 Man ettCr f ar - s ig nte d journalist, the merchant who 
 knows better the laws of trade, the manufac- 
 turer who better appreciates the relations be- 
 tween capital and labor, the farmer who by 
 scientific treatment of his land gets more out 
 of it without exhausting it, and does n't cut 
 down all his trees. The clergyman who has 
 learned from history how religious wars have 
 served the Devil's cause and drenched the sad 
 earth with blood must begin to see that it is 
 for him to call men to agree in their lives 
 rather than differ in their creeds, and if he 
 touch life at many every-day points, as the 
 scholar should, he will tell the merchant, for 
 instance, that putting foreign taxes on domes- 
 tic goods is not altogether compatible with 
 the Decalogue. The doctor who has learned 
 how all parts of the universe act and re-act 
 upon each other will not stop short at the 
 surface symptoms of disease, but will go back 
 to the sources of vital power and, prescribing 
 Tightness of life as the only panacea, the key 
 to the good or ill we leave also to our children, 
 finds himself at once preacher, teacher and 
 healer. But not less the merchant and the 
 manufacturer, the " traders " who give us the 
 products of the earth where we require them 
 66 
 
THE SCHOLAR 
 
 and shaped to our wants, need the wider view The wide 
 of the scholar. These " middlemen " deal View 
 with the great problems of exchange, of capital 
 and labor, of supply and demand, which are 
 the most pressing and in some respects the 
 most threatening problems of this our day. 
 If anywhere a man needs wide knowledge and 
 all the experience history can give him, it is 
 here. If Labor, again as before, smashes the 
 spinning jenny because it is to make less work, 
 or refuses to accept apprentices because that 
 makes more hands to share the same pay, or 
 seeks by disastrous strikes to bite off its own 
 nose to spite the face of Capital, here is the 
 call for the patience, the wisdom, the justice 
 of the scholar, who can look from another 
 point of view than his own, who can look with 
 kindness and sympathy upon the mistakes of 
 ignorance, who can show what these mistakes 
 are, and convince from actual cases in the past 
 that the workingman is presently the better 
 off because of the machines he would break 
 or the increasing labor to which he would 
 deny opportunity. It is for the scholar to 
 point out that present loss is future gain, and 
 in this great question of industrial relations he 
 finds most noble field for his best efforts. 
 Passing beyond the professional man, we 
 
 6 7 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 The Scholar reach the farmer, the great producer, the 
 Farmer human agent in the chemistry of Nature by 
 which dull matter becomes the food of life, 
 the man upon whom all the rest of us depend 
 for the first conditions of existence. " Will 
 you have him also a scholar ? " Yes. For 
 generations indeed his lot has been among the 
 most narrowing known to mankind. Wedded 
 to the soil, his tendency has been to become 
 inert, like the soil itself. The American 
 farmer has taken a step beyond and above this 
 dull living, but the true development of agri- 
 cultural life is yet to be worked out on the 
 broader lines of the scholar. The farmer, to 
 make the most of his land, must be something 
 of a chemist and of a naturalist and of an 
 economist : he must know what his soil can 
 best produce and what elements it lacks ; what 
 are the conditions of plant and animal life ; 
 what are the conditions of supply and demand 
 in the world's markets which he serves. 
 These things the farmer has learned, by hard 
 experience in greater or less degree, since the 
 world began : but now education begins to 
 save him the hard knocks as machinery has 
 begun to save him the dull work. Here as 
 everywhere the educated man pulls ahead. 
 The farmer needs also to know something of 
 68 
 
THE SCHOLAR 
 
 the economics of government, for it is on his 
 broad back that taxes are piled to make other 
 classes rich, and he cannot afford to be fooled 
 as he has been by delusions that promises to 
 pay are wealth and that a people can be made 
 rich by robbing Peter to pay Paul. " Would 
 I idealize mere farming ? " No ; I would sim- Practicalize 
 ply practicalize the scholar. Here is a great the Scholar ' 
 calling, which must always be followed by a 
 great part of mankind : of the 14,400,000 male 
 workers in our country, 7,600,000 are set 
 down by the census of 1880 as agriculturists. 
 There is nowhere more field for intelligent 
 improvement, and intelligent improvement 
 may lift the life of the farmer nearer and 
 nearer to the ideal life. Of a hundred mer- 
 chants, it is said, not five escape failure in the 
 course of their business career; men forget 
 this as they look upon the great fortunes of 
 the five. The farmer's life is a dull life, but 
 it need not be a dull life. And is it not the 
 scholar who contains in himself the most re- 
 sources against dullness — within his books, 
 wise and delightful companionship ; in his 
 knowledge of Nature, a wellspring of delight ; 
 in his relations with his " hands " the best op- 
 portunity for the j oy of helpful service. Alone 
 on his farm, or in the more perfect rural com- 
 
 69 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 munities already prophesied, the educated 
 man, away from the worry and haste and tu- 
 mult of great cities, will find his compensa- 
 tions. Assured by better knowledge of con- 
 ditions a surer and more abundant livelihood, 
 the facilities of modern travel give him the 
 broadening opportunities of the wider world, 
 and it is an easy prophecy that many of the 
 problems which perplex our civilization — the 
 gravitation toward our crowded cities, the 
 surplus of non-producing middlemen — are to 
 find their solution in the scholar on the farm. 
 For I think there are to be seen, amidst 
 Reaction the discontent, the restlessness, which charac- 
 Content terize our generation and our country, signs 
 of the times that already show a reaction 
 toward content. We begin to see that the 
 man of colossal fortune is one who comes into 
 port from seas where many fleets are wrecked ; 
 and the man of colossal fortune himself begins 
 to see that out of his goods he can get so 
 much good and no more. One of the Astors 
 is reputed to have said that he could enjoy 
 out of his estates only a fair salary for taking 
 care of them. And in Wall Street men will 
 tell you that despite the great fortunes, the 
 speculator averages no more, and often less, 
 than equal brains would earn in work that 
 70 
 
THE SCHOLAR 
 
 produces value instead of, for the most part, 
 destroying it. It is before America to de- 
 velop a political system that shall really be 
 " the greatest good of the greatest number ; " 
 an economic system that shall not make " the 
 rich richer, and the poor poorer ; " a social 
 system that shall produce content. Room for 
 the scholar here ! 
 
 Nor let us forget the scholar in the home 
 — the woman educated to think alongside The Wo- 
 the man, to keep him to high aim by her in- ofholar 
 telligent inspiration. And if there were no 
 other call to the woman to use the opportu- 
 nities of higher education newly opening be- 
 fore her, there would be all-sufficient motive 
 in a fit preparation for the education of her 
 children. How shall the mother do her part 
 in forming the mind and the character of the 
 child unless she has taken the scholar's pains 
 to learn how the child mind develops and by 
 what methods and in what order knowledge 
 is to be taught ? It is for the mother first 
 that Pestalozzi and Froebel and Spencer have 
 queried Nature. To inspire the present, to 
 mould the future, is the divine task which is 
 set before the woman as scholar, if she will 
 but accept her opportunity. 
 
 Finally, the scholar ought to be the better 
 
 n 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 The better citizen. Here is " the scholar in politics," of 
 *' 1 lzen whom in these latter days so much has been 
 heard. Certainly there is no place where 
 the scholar is more needed, nor is there yet 
 danger of too many of his kind there. Yec 
 here also he is now accepting his work. And 
 his opportunity has come with his willingness 
 to use it. We no longer hear so much about 
 prigs and Pharisees and " Sunday-school poli- 
 tics : " the despised " amateur politician," edu- 
 cated, has been outgeneraling the professional 
 politician, uneducated, on his own chosen field 
 of battle. The man who is really willing to 
 work for something outside himself has an 
 enormous advantage in this very practical 
 sphere of life. "The leaders lead/:" the 
 leadership of educated and unselfish men is a 
 fact fixed in the constitution of the universe. 
 It is only when they fail to come to the front 
 — and to stay there — that the misleaders 
 mislead. This is a responsibility the scholar 
 cannot throw off, for his plea of the hopeless- 
 ness of improvement is only confession of his 
 own apathy or his own timidity. I grant you 
 that the scholar has often been timid, that he 
 has too often talked more bravely than he has 
 acted. But I say that is treason to scholar- 
 ship : who, if not the scholar, shall have the 
 72 
 
THE SCHOLAR 
 
 faith that moves mountains? Is it not he The Scholar 
 who knows that infinitely small atoms make in Polltlcs 
 the big world, that one point of light radiates 
 influence through the universe ; he who can 
 trust with certainty the educational methods 
 of political progress ; he who can see far land- 
 marks of history and make sure that the world 
 does progress ? Let " the scholar in politics " 
 have the faith and the pluck and the persist- 
 ence to do the work that calls out to him ; it 
 is for that he is a scholar. And let us hope 
 that the " scholar in politics," the scholar 
 everywhere, is more and more to have an 
 opportunity of proving his use to his fellow- 
 citizens, his fellow-men. The scholar, edu- 
 cation in person, is the pillar of the free state. 
 His name may not be known, — that is not 
 his business, nor yours, — but his work tells. 
 And the scholar knows that though he die, 
 his work goes on. 
 
 " Unto each man his handiwork ; unto each his crown, 
 The just fate gives ; 
 Whoso takes the world's life on him, and his own 
 lays down, 
 He, dying so, lives. 
 
 * Whoso bears the whole heaviness of the wronged 
 world's weight, 
 And puts it by, 
 
 73 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 It is well with him suffering, though he face man's 
 fate ; 
 How should he die ? 
 
 " Seeing death has no part in him any more, no power 
 Upon his head ; 
 He has brought his eternity with a little hour 
 And is not dead." 
 
 74 
 
THE COLLEGE OF TO-DAY 1 
 
 JN this new city, at the junction 
 of two great rivers, where the The Found- 
 iron highways of the land meet cSleee 
 the highways of the water, des- 
 tined by nature to be the center 
 of a great industrial community and the depot 
 of a great internal commerce, and dedicated 
 by you in wise forethought to the health and 
 best life of that portion of mankind which 
 shall here make its dwelling, — you desire to 
 crown and complete your wholesome system 
 of free education with an institution which 
 shall offer to your youth the opportunities of 
 the higher learning and, by at once centralizing 
 and radiating a wise culture, shall conduce to 
 the intellectual health and wealth of your com- 
 munity. 
 
 And the first question that meets you is : 
 Is it wise to do this at all ? are the most of 
 people better citizens and better men and 
 women for possessing this higher culture ? 
 
 Now it must be admitted that a college can 
 do harm and that culture may be a bad thing. 
 
 1 A supposed address before citizens of the city of 
 Hygeia, proposing to found a college ; reprinted from the 
 " Princeton Review," January, 1884. 
 
 75 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 A false Not a true college or a noble culture, mind 
 you ! But it has become an axiom among 
 philosophers that the finer a thing is the more 
 vile is its corruption. Also a tool is the worse 
 for being a good tool, if it be used for bad 
 ends. The finest skill in moulding and tem- 
 pering steel may be put into a burglar's jimmy. 
 So, then, if culture be but a carping and inac- 
 tive criticism, in the nature of a chronic and 
 irremediable disease that sees the world only 
 through jaundiced eyes, and if a college pro- 
 duce this culture, it is unutterably a bad thing 
 that you should found such a college and 
 possess such a culture. If your college is to 
 sap the vitality of men, to wither their brains 
 by spring-forcing, to make them know so much 
 that they avail nothing, to send forth gradu- 
 ates who are a perpetual sneer at their less 
 learned betters, then let us have no colleges. 
 But are we thus to slap civilization in the face, 
 and because animals can run into evil courses, 
 become vegetables which cannot ? This in- 
 deed amounts to throwing up the game of life 
 and admitting that the world is worse off the 
 older it gets ; we will take to the woods, and 
 play innocently again with our fathers, the 
 monkeys. I do not so read the Bible, or his- 
 tory, or Mr. Darwin ; indeed, it is the business 
 
 76 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 of the true culture to point out the landmarks The Equip- 
 that verify progress, to add to the experience Experience 
 of the individual the experience of the race, 
 to prove that no effort is possible without its 
 result — and no result possible without effort : 
 to send the young man out into life equipped 
 to make a place in it, and with faith which 
 shall never grow old that whatsoever of good, 
 however humble, he puts into the world shall 
 abide in it forever. That there are college 
 weaklings, as there are weaklings everywhere, 
 is not to be denied ; but it is the purpose and 
 mission of the true college to add " strength 
 to strength." Its graduate is to be a wider 
 man, of deeper resource ; if a farmer, a better 
 farmer, at all events a better citizen and a 
 better man. So far as this result is not pro- 
 duced, it is the fault of the man himself, of 
 training that is bad instead of good, or of the 
 social and political conditions into which he 
 emerges. Some of these elements in a present 
 difficulty we may not at this moment consider, 
 but let us here agree that it is not culture, 
 but its abuse that is at fault. In a word, the 
 question is not, Shall we have colleges ? but, 
 Shall we have good colleges ? It is resolved 
 just here into, What kind of college shall 
 we have ? 
 
 77 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 A College It is well to bear in mind, first of all, that 
 proper as a p art £ g enera j education you want a col- 
 
 lege, and that you do not want a university. 
 I use the words not in their historical sense, 
 in which the college was one of the halls 
 of the university, nor in their etymological 
 sense, in which college means a body of men, 
 particularly students, collected together, and 
 university a place where universal learning, 
 the circle of the sciences, is taught, but in the 
 modern sense into which they are clearly dif- 
 ferentiating. According to this view, looking 
 upon the university as a collection of special 
 schools, including also, it may be, a general 
 one, the college is the place where one goes 
 to learn "something about everything," and 
 the university where one goes to learn, in this 
 or that of its professional schools, "every- 
 thing about something." We may keep this 
 in mind by the fancied etymology that college 
 means a collection of knowledge and univer- 
 sity the turning of all knowledge to one end. 
 In this sense the great schools of this country 
 — Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Michi- 
 gan — are universities, with the peculiarity of 
 having as their originating center each a col- 
 lege proper. Now there is no objection to 
 this, except it be the tendency in these great 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 institutions, desiring to make all the use pos- College and 
 sible of the great scholars who as university Universit y 
 professors center there, to confound the col- 
 lege course with the university, as by the 
 adoption in their colleges proper of this very 
 system of elective studies ; but there is an 
 objection, brought out clearly by this distinc- 
 tion, to the colleges, on the other hand, at- 
 tempting to be universities. This is one of 
 the weaknesses, perhaps the one weakness, 
 which brought obloquy upon the " fresh- water 
 colleges," and particularly the small colleges 
 of the West. They were pretentious, for one 
 thing, — a high school was often a State Uni- 
 versity, — whereas the first duty of scholarship 
 is to be honest and modest ; and they set their 
 graduates the bad example of attempting to 
 seem more than they were. It is the business 
 of a college to be a college and of a university 
 to be a university ; and we shall see that while, 
 from the nature of things, there is need of 
 and can be, worthily, but few universities, 
 great and rich centers, there may be colleges 
 everywhere, so long as they are not so small 
 or so poor as to be ill fitted for their work. 
 
 The university, to quote again a happily 
 put dictum of education, is to teach everything 
 about something; that is, the professional 
 79 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 The m schools of which it is composed are to do this 
 Umversi y £ Qr ^ e [ r respective students. For this pur- 
 pose a great center of learning is needed, 
 with great facilities, where specialists will 
 reside and where great libraries and museums 
 may be collected. The professional schools 
 unite for this. Hither comes the man of gen- 
 eral education to aim himself for his special 
 work in life, and here he selects the courses 
 and masters best fitted to give him the tech- 
 nical education he requires. His fellow-colle- 
 gian, not dedicated to the learned professions 
 or to special science, goes meanwhile to the 
 farm, if he is to be a farmer ; to the machine- 
 shop, if he is to be a mechanician ; to the 
 counting-room, if he is to be a business man 
 — each, when he enters his special field, bet- 
 ter qualified because of his college education 
 to succeed in his peculiar calling. The col- 
 lege does not aim ; it makes ready the gun 
 to fire true when it is aimed. It completes 
 general culture, by teaching everything about 
 something. It takes the young man before 
 he is ready to do something in particular and 
 makes him ready to do anything in particular. 
 In particular, let me emphasize, not anything 
 or something in general. It is peculiarly 
 necessary, therefore, that the college should 
 80 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 recognize and enforce from the start, what the Limitations 
 university man must see for himself, the lim- Teaching 
 itations of human knowledge. If you will go 
 into the woods and throw yourself down by 
 the first hand's breadth of turf, and consider 
 for a few moments the infinite play of life 
 that there is about it, the putting forth of 
 the leaf, the flitting of the insect across it, 
 the dew and the winds that water and tend it, 
 you will learn for yourself that there is more 
 in the smallest segment of nature than a life- 
 time of man's infinite mind will suffice to 
 know. A cursory examination of the tariff 
 bill will teach the same thing as regards trade. 
 This is the first lesson that must be learned. 
 It is indeed impossible to learn everything 
 about however small a something, or very 
 much about anything. The college, then, 
 must refrain from attempting to teach too 
 much, else it will succeed only in teaching 
 nothing. But a well-educated man needs to 
 know at least the general relations of all 
 knowledges ; full equipment and concentra- 
 tion are the keys to happiness and success. 
 The college gives one, the university the other. 
 This discriminates at once between the work 
 of two classes of teachers : the university pro- 
 fessor of chemistry, a great chemist, teaches 
 81 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 his students to be in some measure chemists ; 
 the college professor of chemistry, or the de- 
 partment in which chemistry is included, per- 
 haps not a chemist at all, teaches his pupils 
 the general principles of the science, its rela- 
 tions to other sciences and to life, and uses 
 its methods toward the general development 
 of the intellects under his charge. The col- 
 lege course is a general education ; the uni- 
 versity course is a special education. 
 
 Now general education is a question of the 
 General vs. subj ects to be taught, special education is a 
 Education q uest i° n °f tne person to be taught. The one 
 depends on what is known, the range of pre- 
 sent knowledge, which is not an individual 
 matter ; the other depends upon personal 
 choice of a life specialty. A chief purpose of 
 the general or college education is to afford 
 that comprehensive view of the world of know- 
 ledge and activities which shall enable the 
 student to make intelligent choice of the 
 special field to which his tastes lead him and 
 for which his personal qualities fit him. But 
 what this general education should be, he has 
 not the means to decide. Others must deter- 
 mine that for him, and these others must be 
 those already acquainted with the wide field 
 of general knowledge — educated educators. 
 82 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 From this point of view elective studies have " Elec- 
 properly no place in the college course ; they cofleffe" 
 are an infusion of the university idea into the 
 college, and they have the decidedly bad effect 
 of encouraging the American tendency to 
 " save time " by crowding general education 
 into fewer and fewer years so as to put the 
 boy "at his work " at the earliest age possible. 
 It is a heritage from the old idea that to be- 
 come a good merchant a boy must not go to 
 college, but begin by sweeping out the store. 
 We give little enough time for preparation as 
 it is, without college authority for the forcing 
 process. It is of course alleged, as the plea 
 for these elective studies, that they are in- 
 tended to prevent forcing, to save the student 
 from attempting many things he cannot do, 
 that he may do well the one thing he chooses 
 to do. But this is at once a surrender of the 
 principle of general education, a confession 
 that knowledges have already increased be- 
 yond our powers of classification. The elec- 
 tive system is the device, in fact, for eluding 
 the difficulties of a transitional period, in which 
 knowledge has taken a surprising leap, so that 
 we do not yet know how to handle the new 
 results. But the key is given in the simulta- 
 neous growth of that power of analysis and 
 
 s 3 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 generalization which, selecting only typical 
 details, displays the more clearly the great 
 principles and relations of arts, sciences and 
 letters. The history of the world can yet be 
 written in one volume, and more satisfactorily 
 than of o]d ; though with our present accumula- 
 tion of facts no number of volumes can fully 
 cover a single administration. Our dilemma 
 imposes a difficult task upon the governors of 
 our colleges, but let us not admit that a man 
 can no longer be well educated. 
 
 The duty imposed upon the college, then, is 
 Thorough- one of self -limitation on the one side and ap- 
 ness proximate completeness on the other. But 
 
 let us not be charged with forgetting that 
 education is something more than knowledge. 
 Knowledge in itself is naught ; it is useful only 
 when applied as wisdom. It is more impor- 
 tant that a man's mind should be a good tool 
 than that it should be a wide storehouse. 
 That is just the design of the college course. 
 The extreme classicists look with alarm upon 
 the incursion of the natural sciences, because 
 they fear that in the multiplicity of subjects 
 studied there will be no opportunity for thor- 
 oughness in any one. Their mistake lies in 
 forgetting that thoroughness is not a quantity, 
 but a quality. Nothing more influences the 
 84 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 development of character and the direction of 
 activity, personal or national, than the methods 
 of thought ; the philosophers of England have 
 been perhaps quite as effective in her material 
 development as her legislators. It js all the 
 more important, therefore, that the methods 
 taught shall not be one-sided, that the scien- 
 tific method and the literary habit shall be 
 placed side by side. And as far as thorough- 
 ness is concerned, as to use, no one requires 
 it more than the physical experimentalist ; as 
 to training, it depends after all more upon the 
 teacher than upon the subject or the quantity 
 of it taught. We may all agree, then, that 
 the well-ordered college must open the store- 
 house of general knowledge, furnish the key 
 to its treasures, and teach their proper use ; 
 it must, in other words, impart general princi- 
 ples, inform as to the sources of detailed know- 
 ledge, and train in correct methods of thought. 
 The main question, then, between large and 
 small colleges is the sufficiency of the faculty The 
 to cover the wide field of general knowledge. FacuIt y 
 The organization and relation of departments 
 is the matter of prime importance, and if a 
 college cannot command sufficient income to 
 insure equipment in each, it must give way. 
 The new college has this advantage over the 
 85 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 old, that while the latter holds to the tradi- 
 tional division of departments that existed 
 when natural science was only knocking at 
 the door, the former may map out its division 
 lines in view of the new and splendid acquisi- 
 tions. In the light of the new demands and 
 Depart- the old experience, the departments of an 
 ments average college may perhaps be best mapped 
 
 out as follows : — 
 
 f Law — a proper chair for the President. 
 J Historical Sciences. 
 ] Social Science and Metaphysics. 
 l^Art. 
 
 f English — which may include the office of 
 J Librarian. 
 | Ancient Languages. 
 ^Modern Languages. 
 ^Mathematics. 
 < Mixed Sciences. 
 L Natural Sciences. 
 
 This scheme suggests, with the minimum 
 number of chairs, a comprehensive classifica- 
 tion of the subjects of study, in logical divi- 
 sions. It recognizes three great groups, of 
 what may be called social, philological and 
 natural knowledges. 
 
 86 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 Upon the efficiency of the President de- The m 
 pends the harmony and the completeness of President 
 the college work, and his chief care therefore 
 should be neither teaching nor police duty, 
 but the exercise of his executive skill. A 
 great educator will make his college great in 
 its results and single in its workings without 
 interfering with the individuality of the sev- 
 eral instructors. And without the central 
 control of a capable man, the college will lack 
 the essential unity that should characterize it. 
 The activity of present investigation is so con- 
 stantly adding facts to each department of 
 knowledge that each professor is as constantly 
 pressing for more of the student's time, al- 
 though his peculiar function is so to generalize 
 these new facts into principles that he may take 
 less time. In this continuing emergency, as 
 well as in the many relations in which depart- 
 ments or professors trench upon each other, it 
 is the President who must hold tjie even hand 
 of control and balance, while he takes means to 
 bring the efficiency of each professor up to 
 the standard of the highest by the improved 
 methods he may suggest from one class-room 
 to another. It is for him also, following the 
 example of a distinguished American college 
 president, to show to the students themselves 
 87 
 
Tone 
 
 OF EDUCATION 
 
 the relations of the special departments of the 
 curriculum to their general education. 
 
 It is the President who must, more than 
 College any one person, give its tone to the college, 
 as Arnold did to Rugby; he must be the 
 shining example of the educated gentleman, 
 the " whole man," the man of knowledge, of 
 enthusiasm, of moral force, who can inspire 
 younger men and to whom they may aspire. 
 To such presidents the American college sys- 
 tem already owes much ; nor can any man 
 desire a higher life-work than earned for one 
 college president the sobriquet, quite as much 
 in earnest as in kindly jest, of "Mark, the per- 
 fect man." 
 
 Your wise choice of a president, therefore, 
 will be a first condition of success. Take care, 
 when he is chosen, that his office is not ham- 
 pered by the petty details of an officer of po- 
 lice. Take care also that he is left otherwise 
 free for his higher work. He cannot be every- 
 thing else and the president too. But there is 
 one department of teaching, requiring a mini- 
 mum of the professor's and of the student's 
 actual time, yet whose influence might be 
 made the most vital, of which he may well 
 assume the chair, — the department of Law 
 and political (not economic) science. In this 
 88 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 department he may best prepare the student A Chair of 
 to become a well-ordered thinker and a good w 
 citizen. In the general sense of the word law, 
 it would be his function to infuse the young 
 mind with the sense of the universality of law, 
 of the relations of natural laws underlying and 
 harmonizing the several departments of know- 
 ledge, and of the necessity of conforming the 
 intellectual and moral powers, by the culti- 
 vation of habit, to those fundamental laws by 
 whose aid man reaches his highest develop- 
 ment, against which man must gain but a los- 
 ing victory. By such teaching the President 
 may open the way for the highest usefulness 
 of each department, and establish the most 
 direct influence on the development of his 
 students. He voices the highest results of 
 the science and philosophy of our day, which 
 concentrate their teachings in the one thought 
 of the unity of law. 
 
 The importance of the study of law in its 
 specific sense, especially of the history of law, History of 
 has been too much overlooked in our colleges. w 
 Meanwhile most of our law schools, training 
 men technically to become lawyers, have also 
 subordinated that general and historical view 
 of law which should properly form a part of 
 general education. Yet the forms of law have 
 
 8 9 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 Education been one of the most important factors of 
 m Law social development, and one of the most in- 
 fluential agents in determining methods of 
 thought. The educated man should certainly 
 know the facts and the reasons of the devel- 
 opment of "customary" law as the rule of 
 earlier communities ; its gradual supersedure 
 by the invention of statute law ; the wonder- 
 ful influence of Roman law, the law of codified 
 abstract principles, applied by the deductive 
 method, in all modern thought ; the English 
 system of " case law," following the inductive 
 method, which is in direct competition with 
 code law in the States of our own Union ; the 
 relations of law and equity ; the growth of law 
 by judicial and professional interpretation in 
 accordance with the current development of 
 institutions ; the rise and progress of inter- 
 national law ; and the other phases of law 
 which have made part of him as he is, and 
 which underlie the facts he reads in his daily 
 newspaper. All this might be taught in a 
 very small proportion of the college time, and 
 yet it is now scarcely taught at all. 
 
 Following the same line, the work of this 
 chair should include political science, giving 
 the college alumnus that practical acquaint- 
 ance with the growth of governments which 
 90 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 shall enable him to do his part as a voter in Political 
 mitigating and shaping the " practical poli- Science 
 tics " of the day. There is nothing more 
 important to this country than that a large 
 educated class should recognize the truth 
 that government, of a great country or of a 
 petty village, can progress only in the direc- 
 tion of accord with the social and economic 
 conditions which produce it, and the instinct 
 of the practical politician which recognizes 
 this principle by leading him to use "the 
 materials at command " gives him an im- 
 mense advantage over the doctrinaire who 
 refuses to read past history or present facts. 
 The educated man, again, ought to know how 
 government has developed from the patriar- 
 chal to the constitutional form, and the rela- 
 tions of government to society in typical 
 countries ; the rival bases of government, 
 the basis of family, or race, at the foundation 
 of ancient peoples, the basis of territory, or 
 property, at the foundation of modern states, 
 still producing conflicts which appear in to- 
 day's journals under the guise of "the East- 
 ern question," or discussions whether taxes 
 should be laid on persons or on property ; the 
 constitution of his own country, in its practi- 
 cal workings as well as in its legal theory, and 
 91 
 
Sciences 
 
 OF EDUCATION 
 
 the comparison it calls for with the constitu- 
 tional system of England ; the historic view 
 of the principles and work of parties whose 
 conflict has produced our political history and 
 the status of to-day. All this is quite pos- 
 sible without dangerous partisanship, and it 
 would do much to make the college alumnus 
 an intelligent citizen. 
 
 The Chair of Historical Sciences should 
 Historical cover a vastly wider field than the old profes- 
 sorship of history, and it is perhaps not too 
 much to say that its methods should be dia- 
 metrically opposite to the old methods. It 
 may now almost be called the chair of the 
 comparative sciences par excellence, so all- 
 powerful has the comparative method become 
 in their development. It should include com- 
 parative philology, the key to history and the 
 necessary introduction to the useful study of 
 specific languages ; something of comparative 
 mythology, and, finally, comparative history 
 itself, traced from primeval man and ancient 
 society through its manifold development into 
 "to-day." It is not dates that are wanted — 
 a dollar's worth of chronological dictionary 
 can give them much more usefully than any 
 memory — but the key to them. Properly 
 taught, history is the experience of the race 
 92 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 added to the experience of the individual — 
 an inspirer of faith, the key to progress. 
 
 The Chair of Social Science and Metaphy- 
 sics is, in its first-named division, closely con- Social Sci- 
 nected with the chairs already named, and ence 
 the three together afford an excellent example 
 of the necessity of presidential control, which 
 shall establish lines of demarcation and pre- 
 vent controversy between the several depart- 
 ments. In none of these departments are 
 views absolutely settled; but while students 
 should be fully warned of this fact, and thus 
 taught to develop individual judgment, it 
 would be most unfortunate to find professors 
 of differing views waging war over mooted 
 points in the border lines between their 
 respective fields. Social science properly 
 deals with general laws for which history 
 furnishes the facts and principles. It is a 
 still higher generalization, an abstraction from 
 the philosophy of history. This includes, of 
 course, economics (or political economy), on 
 the teaching of which, especially in a com- 
 mercial, self-taxing community, too much 
 stress can hardly be laid. In the present 
 view of metaphysics, that department resolves 
 itself into the teaching of the history of 
 thought, and the chief demand to be made of 
 93 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 the teacher is that he should present fairly, 
 from the point of view of the author and 
 under the light of modern discovery, the 
 great systems of secular and theistic specula- 
 tion — from the savage's simple conceptions 
 through the magnificent dreams of Plato to 
 the Evolution philosophy which colors the 
 sunlight of the present day. It is in this 
 department that the training in method of 
 thought, i. e. y logic, has also place. 
 
 The Chair of Art is on debatable ground. 
 Art Yet I suppose it will not be denied that a 
 
 man is not fully educated unless he has made 
 some acquaintance with the flower as well 
 as with the roots of human activity, not to 
 speak of the enlargement of the faculties of 
 observation and enjoyment which art know- 
 ledge gives. The student should be taught, 
 by lectures and by display of or direction to 
 examples or copies, at least the principles, 
 the history and the great achievements of 
 the graphic and plastic arts, of architecture 
 and, I should certainly say, of music, for the 
 name and work of Beethoven has been of 
 some importance in the world. It is mani- 
 festly impossible, however, that practical 
 education in these arts, which must be an 
 individual matter, should form part of the 
 94 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 general education of the college. The rule 
 still holds good, that the relations of any one 
 art or science to general culture, rather than 
 the practice thereof, are the concern of the 
 college. An exception might be made in the 
 case of drawing, although this should properly 
 be sufficiently pursued in the school. It is 
 now generally acknowledged that knowledge 
 of art is an essential part of a completely 
 educated man ; and so far as elementary prac- 
 tice is essential to that knowledge, it should 
 somewhere be given. 
 
 The Chair of English, including language 
 and literature, is of far more importance than English 
 most of our colleges have recognized. Half 
 a generation ago there was no such depart- 
 ment, except in one or two pioneer colleges. 
 But the intellectual and practical importance 
 of thorough training in the full knowledge 
 and accurate use of our own tongue, and of 
 acquaintance with the treasures of its litera- 
 ture, is becoming more and more recognized 
 with each year. It is in this department that 
 the modern ideas of education are revolution- 
 ary from the old. Grammar, the analysis 
 of speech for the discovery of its laws, was 
 considered one of the elementary studies ; it 
 is now known to belong properly to the ad- 
 95 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 vanced stage of education. The child learns 
 correct speech by imitation and correction, 
 not by the study of laws, which should be a 
 part of elementary education only in so far 
 as they are necessary to elucidate and assure 
 practice. The child's attention should there- 
 fore be directed chiefly to those external fea- 
 tures of language to which its senses naturally 
 open ; it is observation, memory, the sense of 
 rhythm and other beauty, that should first be 
 trained, by reading, the repetition of prose 
 and verse, and by talk, which is the first step 
 in composition. This basis being obtained 
 in the schools, the college is ready to intro- 
 duce the student to the analytical study of 
 Related language. He must know the relations of his 
 Languages mother tongue to other languages ; its direct 
 origin in the Anglo-Saxon, whose elements 
 should be given him ; the derivation of its 
 words, with the careful training in synonymy 
 which is alike the key to accurate thought 
 and certain expression ; the laws of its con- 
 struction, grammar and its departures from 
 " general laws ; " the science of expression, 
 rhetoric ; the history of the development of 
 the language in its literature, and, finally, a 
 philological knowledge of its authors and their 
 leading works. 
 
 96 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 Within the province of this chair come also 
 several auxiliary departments, notably com- 
 position and oratory, the latter, of course, 
 requiring for its practice a specially trained 
 instructor. 
 
 The Professor of English naturally holds 
 also the Professorship of Books and Reading Reading 
 insisted on by Emerson ; and even though the 
 college organization permits a separate keep- 
 ership of books, should be in the relation of 
 the library to the students, the Librarian. 
 Otherwise that important office is apt to be 
 a keepership and nothing else, whereas it 
 should serve one of the most important func- 
 tions of the college. It is of course the 
 business of each professor to acquaint his 
 students with the literature of his depart- 
 ment, and to stimulate a knowledge of these 
 books ; but a general officer is also needed, 
 who shall fulfill the high office which the 
 leading librarians of the day recognize as 
 theirs, — the development of taste in reading, 
 of the easiest methods of actual work, and of 
 a practical acquaintance with books as the 
 keys to knowledge. It is an essential feature 
 of the proper use of the college library that 
 the students, under reasonable restrictions, 
 should have access to the books themselves, 
 97 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 to the shelves. This helps to make the 
 scholar a man commanding the sources of 
 knowledge. It would be useful also if the 
 librarian should make the library to some 
 extent his instruction room, advising person- 
 ally and particularly acquainting the stu- 
 dent, through the methods and literature of 
 bibliography, with the means of searching 
 the world over for the books or book he may 
 need. 
 
 The Chair of Ancient Languages and Lit- 
 Ancient erature is of course concerned chiefly with 
 Languages L at m and Greek, the fountain-heads of our 
 present secular culture, without which, despite 
 elective systems, no man can rightly be called 
 a scholar. Let us not, in the conflict between 
 ancient scholarship and modern science, forget 
 this, nor let us, on the other hand, overlook 
 the fact that to speak or to write Latin or 
 Greek is no necessary or desirable part of 
 general education. Philological training is as 
 important as, and no more important than, 
 scientific training ; and it must not be forgot- 
 ten also that philological training has been in 
 good part transferred to the domain of Eng- 
 lish. English synonymy is more important 
 than Greek accentuation ; yet we still need to 
 be trained in the subtleties of expression best 
 
 98 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 exemplified in the Greek aorist. The college 
 knowledge of these tongues should include a 
 reasonable (reading) acquaintance, especially 
 with their laws of construction, through gram- 
 mars and the authors selected as text-books, 
 and a general knowledge of other authors con- 
 nected with the development of the literature 
 and life of Greece and Rome. The world will 
 never grow so old that it can forget Plato, and 
 yet, in a college paying not a little attention 
 to long-since-forgotten details of Greek or- 
 thography, a student may scarcely more than 
 hear of Plato. This is no true scholarship. 
 The Chair of Ancient Languages should also, 
 taking up the work from the department in 
 which philology is taught, give an outline view 
 of that magnificently organized tongue, the 
 Sanskrit, the mother tongue of our mother 
 languages, and of that other speech, the He- 
 brew, which connects us with another family 
 of tongues and is the language of our earliest 
 sacred books. 
 
 The Chair of Modern Languages and Lit- 
 erature must also recognize its limitations. Modern 
 Spain, Italy and other modern countries have Lan g ua ges 
 their languages, and the student should know 
 where they belong, the character, relations 
 and great names of their literatures, and thus 
 99 
 L.cfC. 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 place them in his general scheme of culture ; 
 but instruction must chiefly be confined to 
 the great representatives of the Latin and 
 Teutonic branches which flow together into 
 our own tongue, viz., French and German. 
 The construction of these languages, and their 
 literatures, should be treated of fully, and, 
 while the college cannot be expected to make 
 expert conversationalists in French or German, 
 it is natural and proper that living languages 
 should to some extent be studied in practical 
 speech. Here, as in English, one of the most 
 useful methods, at the same time storing the 
 mind with enjoyable treasures, is the memo- 
 rizing and recitation of noble verse. 
 
 The Chair of Pure Mathematics must be 
 Pure Math- relied upon for that exact training required 
 ematics especially in the exact sciences. Its teaching 
 deals not with things, but with symbols, and, 
 as a process of abstract reasoning, its study 
 requires a mind well advanced into the reason- 
 ing age. On the other hand, the observation 
 of form, upon which geometry is built, is one 
 of the first things to which the mind opens, 
 and we need a portion of mathematics, arith- 
 metic and much of algebra, early in the course 
 of education, as a key to knowledge beyond. 
 Between which lies this truth, that the facts 
 ioo 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 and properties of form as shown in ocular 
 demonstration should be a part of the earliest 
 education of the child, preparing him for the 
 rational and exact proof left to the college ; 
 that the use of figures, especially on the metric 
 system, and algebraic symbols, including the 
 practice of logarithms, taught much as the 
 child learns the use of language, should be 
 placed, for practical purposes, as early as pos- 
 sible, leaving to the college the higher devel- 
 opment of both. The college course should 
 then include the higher algebra, arithmetic in 
 the rationale of logarithms ; geometry, plane 
 and spherical, in its analytic relations, and 
 trigonometry ; and the science of the calcu- 
 lus, taught on the newer rationalistic basis. 
 At the head of this department should be a An exact 
 patient and exact man, representing to the stu- Man 
 dent the absolute certainty of mathematical 
 method, anxious to satisfy honest inquiry to 
 the utmost detail of exact proof, and not sat- 
 isfied himself until his students are satisfied. 
 That half -teaching which has been too com- 
 mon in the pure mathematics surrenders the 
 entire value of mathematical discipline. 
 
 The Chair of Mixed Sciences has the special 
 function of linking together the most abstract 
 and the most practical results. Its educational 
 
 IOI 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 M:sed :k consists in proving this connection. It 
 
 Sciences ^ ^ ]^^ D g professorship. It applies the 
 processes ;: mathematics to the facts of phy- 
 sics, and thus discovering and developing the 
 great laws which control the universe, applies 
 these in turn to practical usefulness. Its 
 work is the great proof to practical minds of 
 the direct value of science and education. So 
 far as these have not been previously provided 
 for in education, it teaches the facts of physics, 
 static and dynamic, — sound, light, heat and 
 electricity, in their relations to their source 
 and to the human apparatus, and physical as- 
 tronomy. The scientific study of acoustics, 
 optics, etc., and of analytical astronomy, fol- 
 lows, — in association with the final triumph of 
 the mathematics, the analytical mechanics, 
 which presents the equation of the universe. 
 The application of mathematical principles in 
 surveying and navigation and in constructive 
 ("descriptive") geometry 7 — the teaching of 
 which associates itself, however, practically 
 with the art department — concludes its work. 
 Here must be a man who combines with 
 breadth of generalization a keen sense of 
 practical adaptation. 
 
 The Chair of Natural Sciences teaches ob- 
 servation, classification and induction. It 
 102 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 deals with inorganic matter and its transmu- Natural 
 tation into organic life, through the round Sciences 
 of chemistry, geology, botany, zoology. The 
 facts of these the child should be led to teach 
 himself, by observation and simple experi- 
 ment ; the college work should complete the 
 collection of typical facts, induce comparison, 
 arrange classification and discover law. The 
 department needs representative collections 
 and satisfactory though simple apparatus ; and 
 the student, in qualitative and slightly quanti- 
 tative chemical analysis, and in the analysis of 
 plants, should essay for himself acquaintance 
 with scientific methods. I know in my own 
 experience of no more useful college study, in 
 cultivating habits of observation and careful 
 judgment, than that of blowpipe analysis, 
 conducted by the professor at the cost of a 
 few inexpensive specimens and re-agents, and 
 an apparatus of a watch crystal and a clay 
 pipe. 
 
 Such a curriculum, indeed, fulfills the round 
 of knowledge, the circle of the sciences ; but The Round 
 it is met at once by the severe criticism of J > L^e° w " 
 practiced and working teachers, that it is 
 theoretical and ideal, and not practical and 
 possible. It is quite impossible, they object, 
 to " cram " so much into the limited course of 
 103 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 " Cram " the average student. Professor Jevons has al- 
 ready entered protest against the use of this 
 word " cram " as a weapon against all innova- 
 tions, and it may fairly be replied also that 
 much of the memorizing of insignificant de- 
 tails under the existing system is " cram " of 
 a sort to which the word should be applied 
 with obloquy. But the premises of these 
 critics are entirely correct. It is true that, 
 however knowledge grows, human nature and 
 capacity, at least for any immediate term of 
 years, remain much the same. We must make 
 concessions to human limitations and imper- 
 fections. Above all things, let us not increase 
 "the noble army of smatterers," — those aim- 
 less unfortunates who are " jacks of all trades 
 and good at none." Let us not overlook the 
 fact that wisdom is above knowledge, that 
 training is at least as important as learning in 
 the purpose of the college, and that concentra- 
 tion is the final condition of success in life. 
 On these premises, which are fundamental 
 
 > t principles, all must agree. It is in their ap- 
 
 plication that the mistake of the criticism lies. 
 The natural conservatism of the professional 
 mind misconstrues the nature of the suggested 
 change. It is not proposed to increase the 
 amount of mental exertion, but rather by re- 
 104 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 arrangement and better adaptation to decrease A well-or- 
 it. Details are omitted here, that principles eralizatfon 
 may be taught there, and under well-ordered 
 generalization, founded on typical facts ob- 
 tained during the early years of observation, 
 culture becomes more complete and training 
 more instead of less thorough. Each process 
 of development, each method of reasoning, 
 becomes a part of the mental outfit, and thus 
 the well-trained mind possesses a comprehen- 
 sive and well-organized plan, in which every 
 after-acquired fact, law or experience may be 
 assigned to its proper place and be the more 
 easily assimilated by association. 
 
 A second criticism asks whether the college 
 ought, by demanding so much, to narrow the The College 
 range of those who may enjoy its benefits ; Ed1uS?on al 
 whether it should not give a less complete 
 education to more people. This brings us face 
 to face with the at present difficult problem 
 of the relations of the college to the general 
 education out of which its curriculum must 
 proceed. It is noticeable that while there has 
 been much activity in the improvement of the 
 higher education, and much progress, follow- 
 ing the suggestions of Froebel and Pestalozzi, 
 in primary education, the intermediate educa- 
 tion remains much where it was, and blocks 
 105 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 The Middle the road in the middle. Our common schools 
 Schools are st jji u g rammar schools," although, as has 
 been noted, educators are in agreement that 
 "grammar," as such, is the one thing that 
 should not be taught until the very highest 
 grades are reached. And the colleges can- 
 not do their proper work, nor can an approxi- 
 mately correct curriculum be put into practice, 
 until many features of the middle schools are 
 not only reformed but revolutionized. The 
 scheme of the proper education, following the 
 child from its first lessons, should be developed 
 in view of two chief conditions : the order in 
 which the natural development of the mind 
 fits it for the reception of successive stud- 
 ies ; the practical fact that, since the number 
 to be educated decreases each year beyond 
 the early years, the essential subjects must be 
 presented early in the course. Happily these 
 two conditions largely coincide. The pre- 
 sent curriculum of the middle schools has 
 developed from the practical recognition of 
 this last condition, in ignorance of the first, 
 but through much misconception as to which 
 are essential subjects. It is, of course, impor- 
 tant that every child should be taught to 
 speak, to write, to read, to figure, correctly ; but 
 it is now known that the child learns correct 
 1 06 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 speech, for instance, chiefly through its ob- 
 serving faculties, by imitation, and not through 
 its reflective faculties, by study of grammar. 
 The child develops through the what, the how, 
 the why — first the fact, next its relations, 
 lastly its causes ; and yet the lower schools 
 will be teaching the laws of grammar, and 
 leaving the facts of nature, as the elements of 
 botany, for which the child-mind is hungering 
 and thirsting, to the advanced student. The 
 college professor of the natural sciences, for 
 instance, should find the foundations laid for 
 him when the student enters college, whereas 
 now he must begin at elementary facts. A 
 correct college curriculum is scarcely possible 
 as middle education stands now. 
 
 Recognizing, then, the fact that the order 
 in which the mind can best learn is the order Reorgan- 
 in which it can best be taught, it becomes of Education 
 the utmost importance that the college, ad- 
 mitting the necessity of present compromise, 
 should exert its full influence to reorganize 
 the education below. It must compel a high 
 standard in the lower schools by the quality 
 of its entrance examinations, for their sake 
 as well as its own. The best baking cannot 
 make good bread of poor dough ; and if the 
 dough is rejected, the mixers will be more 
 107 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 careful how they work up the flour. The 
 college will do no service by admitting ill-pre- 
 pared youth — no service to them, certainly 
 none to any one else. It is its business to 
 act in general education as the controlling 
 head — as the governor of the steam-engine. 
 The plan of the college is of great impor- 
 College tance ; but of still greater importance, practi- 
 Disciphne ca v} Vj j s th e question of its theory and methods 
 in its relations with students, their discipline in 
 conduct and study. There are two opposing 
 systems. The one considers the student still 
 a boy, hedges him about with close paternal 
 government, stimulates him with merit-marks 
 for successful study, and punishes him with 
 demerits for ill-conduct ; ranks him by exami- 
 nations, rewards him with prizes dependent 
 on his marks, and sends him out with a cer- 
 tificate of excellence. The other patterns the 
 freedom of the German universities (which do 
 not correspond to our colleges), would treat 
 the student as a man responsible only to him- 
 self, permits him to be present or absent at 
 his choice, and otherwise regards him as a 
 free and independent American citizen. The 
 one argues that the student must be trained 
 to enter the world through close supervision 
 and with immediate motives in view; the 
 108 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 other believes that he must learn before he The College 
 enters the world that he must depend on him- Man 2 "" 1 
 self. The tendency of professionalized teach- 
 ers is to follow the first system ; and it must 
 be admitted that the liberal innovators who 
 have reached out toward the freer method 
 have often been sadly disappointed in the 
 practical results. Their students did not ac- 
 cept the responsibility. But perhaps their 
 failure came because they threw themselves 
 upon an ideal method, not modified to conform 
 to actual conditions. The truth is that the 
 American college student is both boy and 
 man ; he comes in a boy, with very little sense 
 of responsibility, and yet he is often qualified 
 to vote long before he takes his degree. The 
 college, receiving him a boy, should send him 
 forth a man. And it should treat him in view 
 of his transitional character during this period. 
 The college theory of discipline should con- 
 template an increasing development of respon- 
 sibility during the successive college years. 
 You cannot successfully appeal to public 
 opinion unless there is a public opinion to 
 which to appeal ; and the failure to recognize 
 this truism has been the cause of the disap- 
 pointment of many liberal educators who have 
 trusted to a sense of responsibility before they 
 109 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 Paternal have taken any pains to develop such a sense. 
 Government And yet the unm i t i gatec i paternal government, 
 
 with its fallible infallibility, into which college 
 methods often return after spasmodic attempts 
 toward a better system, has, it seems to 
 me, been a great curse to this country. Col- 
 lege students, removed from the associations 
 through which they would naturally develop 
 into political activity, are subjected, just as 
 they approach the age of political responsi- 
 bility, to a system of paternal government 
 which, by practically assuming all the respon- 
 sibility itself, destroys the sense of individual 
 responsibility. "College politics," for this 
 reason, often become notoriously corrupt, the 
 field of mere bargaining among cliques ; and 
 the college alumnus is prepared to take 
 "rings "asa matter of course, and to assume 
 that air of blast do-nothingism which has 
 brought culture into disrepute. While, on the 
 one side, our colleges have trained numbers 
 of men to enter usefully into public life, they 
 must, on the other, be arraigned for causing 
 much demoralization. And now that our 
 earlier training-schools, as the New England 
 town-meeting, are losing their educational 
 function, and the flower of our youth are more 
 
 no 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 and more seeking our colleges, this matter 
 becomes of inestimable importance. 
 
 What, then, are the relations which shall 
 develop responsibility ? First, the central Absolutism 
 college authority must be absolute and auto- 
 cratic ; but it should never be necessary to 
 exert its absolute power. It should represent 
 to the student that absolute and inflexible 
 natural law against which the man in active 
 life throws himself in vain, which opposes to 
 him the absolute resistance of a wall of rock 
 against which the headstrong can only be 
 dashed to pieces. This is the most important 
 lesson the young soldier in life can learn, — 
 the absolute necessity of obedience to moral 
 and physical law. Let him be kindly spared, 
 by this apprentice training, the severe pen- 
 alties which unforgiving Nature must other- 
 wise inflict. Now it is the misfortune of any 
 paternal government that, in undertaking to 
 do everything, it betrays itself into a network 
 of inconsistent mistakes, which involve it in 
 constant and weak compromise with individual 
 cases and belittle all ideas of law. Moreover, 
 Nature does not intrude her law. It is felt 
 only when a man runs against it. Nature never 
 " nags." The college authority, then, should 
 be exercised seldom if ever ; but it must be 
 in 
 
bility 
 
 OF EDUCATION 
 
 exercised, when need comes, with rigorous 
 inflexibility, tempered by forgiveness only as 
 far as mercy can safely temper justice. 
 
 Secondly, this necessity of absolute law 
 Student # should be forestalled by concentration of the 
 hiHtv 0nSi " governing power upon the development of 
 the sense of responsibility. If an upper-class- 
 man has not a sense of responsibility which 
 may be practically appealed to, I say boldly 
 that it is somehow the fault of the college 
 authorities. You cannot at once expect it in 
 under-class men, just out of the school lead- 
 ing-strings. Arnold of Rugby defended, 
 against a public opinion strong in his day and 
 overwhelming now, the two English abuses 
 of whipping and fagging. Why ? Because 
 they seemed to him a part of his one purpose 
 — the development of a true responsibility in- 
 stead of a false independence. His younger 
 boys were yet boys, and he kept them de- 
 pendent as fags upon the sixth-form scholars, 
 that they might call forth the sense of respon- 
 sibility in his upper men, who were respon- 
 sible only to him. It was his way of saying 
 that "the leaders lead." If the sixth form 
 did not support him, he used to say, he must 
 go. But they did support him. He had cre- 
 ated a public opinion which never failed to 
 
 112 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 honor his appeals. And what he did in Student 
 modeling Rugby school according to English ^e mment 
 responsible aristocratic government of his day 
 needs to be done in our colleges in accordance 
 with our system. The students should be in 
 the main self-governing, as Fellenberg made 
 his boys. Demerit-marks — a fine levied in 
 the college currency — may be necessary in 
 the lower classes, but there should be stead- 
 fastly developed a student feeling which may 
 be trusted to take upon itself the punishment 
 of misconduct, either by tacit public opinion 
 or in some organized method, as a wrong done 
 to the student community. The superfluous 
 energy which now finds its escape to the cost 
 of the weakest disciplinarian of the faculty 
 might then be absorbed by finding " an ob- 
 ject in life." Kindred questions admit a like 
 solution. Prizes and marks, considered as 
 achievement, instead of the symbol of achieve- 
 ment, are bad : here is the root of that com- 
 mon distemper which confounds money with 
 wealth. This is a matter, again, of student 
 public opinion ; and student public opinion 
 should be within the reach of the faculty, 
 if the faculty be wise. Examinations, it may 
 be added, stand on a basis of their own, use- 
 ful for the grasp of subject a general review 
 US 
 
OF EDUCATION 
 
 Examina- imparts, but still more because they repre- 
 sent to the student, as Professor Jevons has 
 pointed out, those crises in life in which all 
 that has gone to make the man finds at once 
 its test and its opportunity — supreme mo- 
 ments, it may be, in which the whole life 
 finds its focus. Their influence may be the 
 more important when no marking system has 
 preceded them, since there is nothing more 
 vital than that a man should learn to conduct 
 his daily life in view not of immediate but of 
 ultimate ends. 
 
 A college thus widely planned, officered 
 by men who can inspire as well as teach, with 
 a student body self-disciplined and eager for 
 advancement, cannot but be a blessing to any 
 community by which liberality is fostered. 
 The student body in particular, neither rioters 
 nor young prigs, should be as helpful as now 
 often it is harmful. And the faculty should 
 give to it, and to the community, their help 
 and their example. They should be a band of 
 working scholars, not hesitant to take their 
 part in outer life, and eager to instruct and 
 inspire beyond the limits of their class-rooms. 
 It is for them to bind together with their 
 influence the microcosm of student life and 
 the macrocosm of the outer world. 
 114 
 
THE COLLEGE 
 
 Such an institution will not fail to produce Reverence, 
 
 for us that temper of mind, derided rather Enth ?? i ": i . 1 . 
 . , , . ■ . asm, Faith 
 
 than encouraged by a culture less wise, m 
 
 which efficient work must find assurance ; the 
 temper which results from those cardinal 
 virtues of the soul, — reverence, enthusiasm 
 and faith. These, and the need of them, a 
 wise training, catholic and wholesome, must 
 emphasize. That grateful reverence which 
 finds in the less favored but fruitful past the 
 seeds from which the happier present flowers 
 — a reverence venerating age; that respon- 
 sible enthusiasm well ordered to direct its 
 divine desire for the present help of human- 
 kind — an enthusiasm honoring manhood ; 
 that patient faith, the prophetic reward of 
 daily toil, which sees in an assured future the 
 ever-perfecting fulfillment of this imperfect 
 yet sufficient present — a faith recognizing in 
 every child the possibility of the supreme 
 man ; — such reverence, such enthusiasm, 
 such faith are the fruit and the seed of a true 
 culture, vital to progress and to the welfare 
 of mankind. 
 
 115 
 
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