t d 41 f APR 7 ittutt LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. Chap. Copyright No. sheic2^__gi.. ^%« UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THE MEANING OF EDUCATION AND OTHEE ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES •Tt^?><^o THE MEANING OF EDUCATION Aim OTHER ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES BY :n"icholas mueeay butlee PROFESSOS OF PHILOSOPHY AND EDUCATION IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 1898 All rights reserved Znd COPY, 1898« \€^n \'^% 4817 OOPTKIGHT, 1898, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY J. S. Gushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith Norwood Mass. U.S.A. CONTENTS PAGE The Meaning of Education .... 3 What Knowledge is of Most Worth ? . . 37 v Is THERE A New Education? . . . .69 Democracy and Education . . . . 99 K The American College and the American University ....... 125 The Function of the Secondary School . 151 v^ The Reform of Secondary Education in the United States 187 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from The Library of Congress http://www.archive.org/details/meaningofeducati03butl INTRODUCTION The essays and addresses brought together in this volume give expression to convictions and opinions on the subject of education that have been presented during the past fifteen years, in one form or another, to hundreds of audiences, mainly of teachers, in almost every state of the Union. The belief that controls them all is threefold : first, that education, in the broad sen^e in which I use the term, is the most important of human interests, since it deals with the preservation of the culture and efficiency that we have inherited and with their extension and development ; second, that this human interest can and should be studied in a scientific spirit and by a scientific method ; and, third, that in a democracy at least an edu- cation is a failure that does not relate itself to the duties and opportunities of citizenshipc vii Viii INTRODUCTION Education is sharply distinguished, there- fore, from the far narrower field of instruc- tion, as that in turn is broader than the field of school-life. To give to education its right- ful place in our thinking involves relating it to the laws of life in general, and especially to those laws as viewed from the standpoint of the doctrine of evolution. This I have aimed to do by proposing an extension of the commonly received doctrine of infancy, which though as old as early Greek philosophy ,i owes its definite statement and exemplification to Mr. John Fiske. In this way the theory of education is given what it has hitherto lacked, a distinct relationship to the facts of organic and social evolution. A standard must next be sought by which the value of educational processes and influ- ences may be judged. I find this standard in the conclusion, common, I am confident, to the best philosophy and to the soundest science 1 Butler, " Anaximander on the prolongation of infancy in man," in Classical Studies in Honor of Henry Drisler (New York: The Macmillan Co. for the Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1894). INTRODUCTION ix alike, that the facts of nature must be ex- plained, in the last resort, in terms of energy, and that energy in turn can be conceived only in terms of will, which is the fundamental form of the life of mind or spirit. I offer these two conclusions as the basis for an educational philosophy. With them in mind I have discussed a number of concrete problems that are of present importance not to teachers alone, but to thoughtful parents and to conscientious citizens. It is sometimes hastily objected that the attempt to formulate a scientific study of ed- ucation is impossible. This objection rests upon a misunderstanding as to what a science is. Science is wholly a matter of method ; it is knowledge classified, and nothing more. The knowledge so classified may be know- ledge of plants, or of heavenly bodies, or of the human body, or of forms of government, or of education. Only the sciences based upon mathematics are exact or lay claim to exact- ness ; all others are descriptive only, and wider experience or further observation may modify their conclusions at any time. A science of X INTRODUCTION education is analogous to a science of medicine. Both are built upon a group of ancillary sci- ences, and both arrive at conclusions that are only working hypotheses. With normal chil- dren, as with normal patients, these hypotheses, based as they are upon wide experience, require little or no modification ; in abnormal cases, however, they must be modified or sometimes even abandoned. Neither medicine nor edu- cation makes any pretense to exactness. It is highly important for the study of education that a consistent nomenclature be adopted and used, though for a variety of rea- sons this is a difficult task to accomplish. Bearing in mind this need, I have endeavored to mark off the several types or grades of educational institutions from each other, and to give to each its appropriate name. Many American educational problems that appear very complex, would become much simpler if the various institutions giving systematic in- struction were always called each by its right name. To the teachers of the United States, espe- cially to those who are members of the Na- INTRODUCTION xi tional Educational Association, I am under the deepest obligations for the encouragement and sympathy that have led to the publica- tion of these essays and addresses. To the patient criticism and the kindly suggestion of my friends and colleagues, Brander Matthews and George Rice Carpenter, I owe many im- provements in the form in which the papers now appear. NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER Columbia UNrvERSiTY, New York March, 1898. THE MEANING OF EDUCATION An Address delivered before the Liberal Club of Buffalo, New York November 19, 1896 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION Those who have an acquaintance, however cursory, with the history of human thought well remember how bitter and how persistent have been the controversies of philosophers and metaphysicians in respect to terms of everyday use. Discussions on such familiar words as "substance," "cause," "idea," and "matter" have shaken the schools for ages. It seems to be a fact that when a term is somewhat unusual and remote from our experience and our interest, we are apt readily to be able to assign to it a definite significance and a con- crete meaning ; but when it is a term with which we are familiar in our everyday experi- ence and conversation, we often feel its sig- nificance and its import, and yet find great difficulty in defining it accurately in logical or in scientific terms. 4 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION I shall discuss the meaning of Infancy and Education just because the terms are familiar, because the ideas are commonplace, and be- cause, as it seems to me, we so often fail to grasp their profound and far-reaching signifi- cance. The point of view from which I shall speak of them is the one given us by that remarkable generalization which has come to be known as the doctrine of evolution, a the- ory which we all associate with the nineteenth century, but which, nevertheless, was seen by the thinkers of the ancient world, by the light- ning flashes of their genius, in what is after all very much the form in which the olear sun- light of modern scientific demonstration pre- sents it to us. The doctrine of evolution has illuminated every problem of human thought and human action. It is a mere truism to say that it has revolutionized our thinking ; but it is equally true that we have in very many cases failed to accept the consequences of the revolution and to understand them in all their important applications. It seems to me that in no department of our interest and activity is this failure more complete, speak- THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 5 ing generally, than in that which relates to the great human institution of education. The two chief contributions that light up this doctrine from the point of view that I wish to occupy are those that were made by Mr. Al- fred Russell Wallace and by Mr. John Fiske. It was Mr. Wallace who pointed out, forty odd years ago, that the theory of evolution as applied to man could sustain itself only if it were acknowledged and admitted that there came a time in the history of animal types and forms when natural selection seized upon psy- chical or mental peculiarities and advantages and perpetuated them rather than merely phys- ical peculiarities and advantages. That is the first, and in a sense, perhaps, the greater of these contributions, for it has enabled us to un- derstand the place of man in the order of the cosmos. Then, in less than a generation, the re- markable insight of Mr. John Fiske explained for us on physiological and psychological grounds the part played by the lengthening period of infancy in the animal species. It is from that doctrine of Mr. Fiske that I take my point of departure in the present argument. 6 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION We have come to understand that evolu- tion regards us all as individual centres of activity, influenced by our surroundings and reacting upon them. We have come to un- derstand that our physical, our mental, and our moral life is the gradual growth or de- velopment of what may be conceived of as a point travelling through an ever-widening series of circles, until, in this ripe and culti- vated age, the point has come to include within the circumference that it traces, all that we call the knowledge or acquirement or culture of the educated man. The doctrine of infancy, as it has been ex- plained to us, relates itself directly to that figure and to that method of explanation. If we contrast or compare the lower orders of animal life with the higher, and particularly with the human species, we are at once struck by the fact that in the lower orders of exist- ence there is no such thing as infancy. We observe that the young are brought into the world able to take care of themselves, to react upon their environment at the mere contact of air or food, to breatlie, to digest, THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 7 and to live an individual existence. We are further struck by the fact, on examining the structure of animals of that kind, that there is no nervous system or organization present, except such as is necessary to carry on what are called reflex actions. There is no central storage warehouse ; there is nothing corre- sponding to the human brain ; and there is no action possible for animals of that type in which any considerable time can elapse between the impulse which comes in from the world without, and the responding or reacting movement or action on the part of the animal itself. Each of those animals lives the life of its parents. Each of those animals, young and old alike, performs cer- tain reflex actions with accuracy, with sure- ness, with despatch ; no one of those animals progresses, and none develops or has a his- tory. When we pass to animals of a higher order, however, there comes a time when our attention is attracted by those that act in an entirely different way. Their actions are more complex, more numerous, more subtile, more sustained ; and on turning again to the or- 8 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION ganism that accompanies tliis and makes it possible, we see at once that there is an in- creased complexity of structure which accom- panies this increasing complexity of function. We find, as we study more highly organized types of animal existence, that, sooner or later, there comes a time when the offspring of a given animal comes into the world un- able to perform many of the functions that become possible for it later. It brings with it a host of developed reflex actions, but it also brings with it many undeveloped poten- tialities. Its organization is not complete at the moment of birth ; and a period of help- lessness or infancy, longer or shorter, must result. In passing from the highest of the lower animals to man, we reach a most im- portant stage in the development of infancy. In man we find the increasing bulk, and more than that, the increasing complexity, of the brain and central nervous system which ac- company the complex adjustments and actions that make up life. But though the human animal is born into the world complete as to certain series of reflex actions, its lungs THE MEANING Or EDUCATIOIf 9 able to breathe, its heart to beat, its blood vessels to contract, its glands to secrete, an immense series of adjustments remains to be m.ade. While those adjustments are being made, there is a more or less prolonged period of helplessness or infancy^ The meaning of that period 'of helplessness or infancy lies, as I see it, at the bottom of any scientific and philosophical nnderstanding of the part played by education in human life. Infancy is a period of plasticity ; it is a period of adjustment ; it is a period of fitting the organism to its enTironment : first, physi' cal adjustment, and then adjustment on a far larger and broader scale. This fitting of the organism to its enyironment on the larger and broader scale is the field of education. In other words, nature and heredity haye so or- ganized one side of animal life that it is com- plete at the time of birth. A large series of adjustments to the world around us, the series of adjustments that in the case of man make up the life that is really worth liying, consti- tutes the life of the mind or spirit. At birth, those adjustments are not yet made and they 10 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION have to be slowly and carefully acquired. We are even born into the world with our senses, "the windows of the soul," locked, uncoordi- nated, unadjusted, unable to perform what is eventually to be their function. It is a famil- iar fact that sight, hearing, and touch all have to be developed and trained and coeducated, taught to act together, before the infant can appreciate and understand the world of three dimensions in which adults live, and which they have supposed to be the only world known to the human consciousness. While that period of plasticity or adjustment lasts, there is natu- rally and necessarily a vast influence exerted, not only on the child but by the child. I think Mr. Fiske is undeniably correct in saying that the prolonged period of infancy which is necessary to bring about these ad- justments, lies at the foundation of the human family, and therefore at the foundation of society and of institutional life. The factor in history that has changed the human being from a gregarious animal to a man living in a monogamic family is, if anthropology and psychology teach us anything, unquestionably THE MEANING OF EDUCATION H the child. During this long period of helpless- ness and dependence, the parents of the child are kept together by a common centre of inter- est; and the bonds of affection and interdepend- ence that are eventually to constitute the family are then permanently and closely knit. That period of mutual association and dependence of the parents extends at first over only eight, ten, or twelve years. If two, three, or four children are born to the same parents, it may extend over a period much longer ; it may last during one-third or even one -half of the aver- age life of man. Out of that centre of depend- ence and helplessness, the family, as we know it, has grown ; and it has been constituted, so far as we can explain it at all, by the lengthening period of infancy in the animal kingdom and in the human race. I might cite fact after fact in illustration of this, from the history of science and from natural history, were it not wholly unnecessary. It is one of the most profound generalizations of our modern science ; and it has enabled us to see to the very bottom of the meaning of education and to under- stand the biological significance of one of the 12 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION most striking and imposing of social phe- nomena. This lengthening period of infancy is a period of plasticity. No animal that has not a period of infancy needs to be educated. Every animal that has a period of infancy can and must be educated. The longer the period of infancy the more education is possible for it ; and as our civilization has become more complex, as its products have become more numerous, richer, deeper, and more far-reach- ing, the longer we have extended that period of tutelage, until now, while the physiological period of adolescence is reached in perhaps four- teen or fifteen years, the educational period of dependence is almost twice as long. That is to say, the length of time that it takes for the human child in this generation so to adapt himself to his surroundings as to be able to succeed in them, to conquer them, and to make them his own, is almost, if not quite thirty years. The education in the kindergarten, the elemen- tary school, the secondary school, the college, the professional school, the period of appren- ticeship in the profession before independent THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 13 practice can be entered upon, is in not a few cases, now twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty- eight, or even thirty years. The rich suggestion that this doctrine of Mr. Fiske and this conception of modern science have for us, seems to me to be this: — The entire educational period after the physical adjustment has been made, after the child can walk alone, can feed itself, can use its hands, and has therefore acquired physical and bodily independence, is an adjustment to what may be called our spiritual environment. After the physical adjustment is reasonably complete, there remains yet to be accomplished the build- ing of harmonious and reciprocal relations with those great acquisitions of the race that con- stitute civilization ; and therefore the lengthen- ing period of infancy simply means that we are spending nearly half of the life of each genera- tion in order to develop in the young some con- ception of the vast acquirements of the historic past and some mastery of the conditions of the immediate present. In other words, the doctrine of evolution teaches us to look upon the world around us 14 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION — our art, onr science, our literature, our insti- tutions, and our religious life — as an integral part, indeed as the essential part, of our en- vironment ; and it teaches us to look upon education as the plastic period of adapting and adjusting our self -active organism to this vast series of hereditary acquisitions. So that while the child's first right and first duty is to adjust himself physiologically to his envi- ronment, to learn to walk, to use his hands and to feed himself, to be physically inde- pendent, there still remains the great outer circle of education or culture, without contact with which no human being is really either man or woman. The child receives first, and in a short series of years, his animal inheri- tance ; it then remains for us in the period of education to see to it that he comes into his human inheritance. When we compare the life of the lower animal, acting solely and entirely by reflex action and instinct, with the periods of infancy and of self-determined ac- tivity of the human being, developing by reflex action, instinct, and intelligence, we get some conception of the vast difference there THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 15 is between what Descartes called the animal mechanism and what we may truly look upon as the activity of the human mind. This period of adjustment constitutes, then, the period of education ; and this period of adjustment must, as it seems to me, give us the basis for all educational theory and all educational practice. It must be the point of departure in that theory and that practice, and it must at the same time provide us with our ideals. When we hear it sometimes said, "All education must start from the child," we must add, "Yes, and lead into human civilization " ; and when we hear it said, on the other hand, that all education must start from the traditional past, we must add, " Yes, and be adapted to the child." We shall then understand how the great educational temple of modern times into which every civilized nation is pouring out its strength and its treasure, rests upon the two corner-stones of the physical and psychical nature of the child and the traditional and hereditary civili- zation of the race ; and how it is that the problem of the family, of the school, and of 16 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION the home, is to unite those two elements so that each shall possess the other. We shall then have a conception of education which is in accord with the doctrine of evolution and which is in accord with the teachings of modern science and of modern philosophy. After the child comes into the enjoyment of his physical inheritance, he must be led by the family, the school, and the state into his intellectual or spiritual inheritance. The mo- ment that fact is stated in those terms it becomes absolutely impossible for us ever again to identify education with mere instruc- tion. It becomes absolutely impossible for us any longer to identify education with mere acquisition of learning ; and we begin to look upon it as really the vestibule of the highest and the richest type of living. It was the great thought of Plato, that inspired every word he ever wrote and that consti- tutes an important portion of his legacy to future ages, that life and philosophy are identical; but he used the word philosophy in a sense which was familiar to him and to his time, and for which we might very well THE MEANING OF EDUCATION IT substitute, under some of its phases at least, the word education. Life and education are identical, because the period to which we tra- ditionally confine the latter term is merely the period of more formal, definite, determinate adjustment ; yet, just so long as life lasts and our impressionability and plasticity remain, we are always adapting ourselves to this environ- ment, gaining power, like Antseus of old, each time we touch the Mother Earth from which civilization springs. If education cannot be identified with mere instruction, what is it ? What does the term mean? I answer, it must mean a gradual adjustment to the spiritual possessions of the race. Those possessions may be variously classified, but they certainly are at least five- fold. The child is entitled to his scientific inheritance, to his literary inheritance, to his aesthetic inheritance, to his institutional in- heritance, and to his religious inheritance. Without them he cannot become a truly edu- cated or a cultivated man. He is entitled to his scientific inheritance. In other words, he is entitled to go out into 18 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION nature, to love it, to come to know it, to under- stand it ; and he is entitled to go out into it, not only as the early Greek and Oriental thinkers went, with fear and trembling and worship, but he is entitled to go out into it armed with all the resources of modern scien- tific method and all the facts acquired by modern research. He is entitled to know how it was that we have passed from the world known to the heroes of the Iliad to the world as we know it to-day. Pie is entitled to know how the heavens have declared their glory to man, and how the worlds of plant and animal and rock have all come to unfold the story of the past and to enrich us with the thought and the suggestion of the intelligence, the design, the order that they manifest. There can be no sound and liberal education that is not based in part upon the scientific inheritance of the race» The learning of the multiplication table, the learning of the necessary preliminary defini- tions, the learning of the necessary methods of research and practice — all these are the lower steps of the ladder, the needful steps by which we must mount ; and yet they are the THE MEANING OE EDUCATION 19 steps from which how often we fall back with- out having gained any vision whatever of the land to which they are supposed to lead ! The scientific inheritance is one of the very first elements of a modern liberal education, because it is that element which presents itself earliest to the senses of the child. It is the element with which he comes in immediate sense-con- tact ; to which he can be first led ; from which he may be made to understand and draw 7 lessons of the deepest significance for his life f and for that adaptation which is his edu- cation. Next there is the vast literary inheritance, the phase of the past that mankind has during twenty-five hundred years most loved to dwell upon. It is the side that has captivated the imagination, enshrined itself in language, and brought itself closest to the heart of cultivated man, — going back to the earliest attempts at mythology and coming down to the great poetry and the great prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in modern tongues. We have gone so far as to call this aspect of civilization the "humanities," because most of 20 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION all it seems to bear upon its surface the sig- nificance of tliat fine old word humanitas which was once the ideal of liberal education. *' Hu- manities " these studies undoubtedly are, but humanitas is a broader term still, and in its full significance must be made to include all our inheritance, scientific, aesthetic, institu- tional, and religious, as well as literary. Just as scientific method is the gate to the scientific inheritance and therefore must in essence at least be mastered, so language is the gate to the literary inheritance and must be mastered at the earliest opportunity. We are accus- tomed, as a rule, to estimate and weigh power and culture in terms of language. The mas- tery of various languages, the mastery even of the mother tongue, is often taken as the sole test of culture. That is our tribute to its great importance. We see how easily the mastery of a language, or of more than one, lends itself to this conception of education as an adaptation, as an adjustment, to the spiritual environment of the race. Language is the crystallized thought of the past. It contains in itself, in its products and THE MEANING OE EDUCATION 21 its forms, in its delicate discriminations, its powers of comparison and abstraction, a record of the progress of the thought of the race. When we are plodding through dreary de- tails of grammar and of rhetoric we are again on the lower rungs of the ladder, the multi- plication table of the literary inheritance, the steps that must be taken if we are to come to understand what the great world- poets and seers have revealed to us. There- fore it is that we are to-day putting the literary inheritance side by side with the sci- entific in the very earliest years of the educa- tion of the child. In the education that is sometimes called " new," it will be found that the early linguistic exercises are almost always based upon something that is really worth knowing for its own sake. Our litera- tures the world over, ancient and modern, are so rich, so full of thought and feeling and action, that there is no time to waste in the merely formal exercises of grammatical drill upon lifeless material, when w^e may be occupy- ing ourselves, in those same exercises and for the same purpose of discipline, with material 22 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION that enriches the human mmd and touches and refines the human heart. Modern education in its adjustments is bringing the child into his literary inheritance in a new spirit. That inheritance has always been before mankind. In the Middle Ages, in early modern educa- tion, in European education to-day, the study of language and literature is and has been the main element in instruction. It must always hold a prominent place in education, for it ad- mits of no substitute. Yet it is mere narrow- ness to say that this study alone is sufficient, and that it excludes everything else. It should come side by side with the scientific inheritance in the early life of the child, during the period of plasticity or education. -~^-^rhe third element in education is the aes- thetic inheritance, that feeling for the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime that has al- ways been so great a part of human life, that contributes so much to human pleasure and accentuates so much of human pain and suffering. The ancient Greeks understood and used it, but a false and narrowing philosophy thrust it out of life and education for cen- THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 23 turies because it was supposed to antagonize the spiritual or religious life. It was believed that the spirit could be chastened only by privation and by pain, by tearing it away from one whole side of human civilization, and by insisting that the human heart should suppress its feeling, its longing for the ideal in the realm of feeling and of beauty. The closet philoso- phers could accomplish their end in education for a time, but they were utterly unable to sup- press the builders of the Gothic cathedrals or the Italian painters of the Renaissance, and they have been unable to suppress the artistic element in human life. To-day we find it coming back to occupy its appropriate place. We should no longer think of applying the word cultivated to a man or woman who had no aesthetic sense, no feeling for the beauti- ful, no appreciation of the sublime, because we should be justified in saying, on all psychologi- cal grounds, that that nature was deficient and defective. This great aspect of civilization, this great tide of feeling that ebbs and flows in every human breast, which makes even the dull and inappreciative peasant uncover his 24 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION head as he passes through the wonderful gal- leries of the Vatican or the Louvre — this, too, is a necessary factor in adjusting our- selves to the full richness of human conquest and human acquisition. Unless we are to be mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, we should see to it that the sesthetic inheri- tance is placed side by side with the scientific and the literary in the education of the human child. To-day we find art creeping into the schoolroom ; instruction in color, in form, in expression is being given. The growing child is surrounded with representations of the classic in art, and so, unconsciously and by imitation, he is being taught to adapt and adjust himself to this once forgotten and now recovered element in human civilization; an element that certainly is, like the scientific and literary elements, an integral part of the child's inheritance. Then there is also the wonderful institu- tional inheritance, most wonderful of all, be- cause it brings us into immediate contact with the human race itself. This is the element of civilization before which we must, for the mo- THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 25 ment, sink differences of scientific opinion, differences of literary appreciation, differences of sesthetic judgment, and in which we look upon individual man as but a member of a larger whole, in order to understand what human civilization really means. We have always had before us, in the history of civiliza- tion, two extreme types of thought and opinion as to human institutions. We have had the view typified in modern philosophy by Rous- seau, and wrought out in the streets of Paris from 1789 to 1794. This is, substantially, the view that every individual is sufficient unto himself. It is the view of the ancient Sophists, once combated by Socrates in the streets of Athens, that there are as many truths as there are men to perceive truth, and that each indi-- vidual is the sole arbiter of his own fortunes. This is what I may call the atomic view of human society, which would blow all of our institutional life into millions of atoms and deify each. That view has failed to work itself out successfully in history ; when it has had a momentary victory it has simply been because it came as a reaction against the 26 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION tyranny of the opposite extreme. We have had the other extreme also. We have had the view which insists that no individual is of any consequence or importance in the presence of the mass ; the view that all individual peculi- arity, all individual power or acquisition, must be pressed down and trampled under foot for the advantage of the whole. We have seen it in the civilization of China in the interest of ancestor worship ; we have seen it in the civili- zation of India in the interest of the caste sys- tem ; we have seen it in the civilization of Egypt in the interest of the priestly class ; and we have seen those three civilizations wither and die. We have come to understand, again follow- ing the seed-thought of the Greeks, that the true line of institutional progress lies between the two extremes ; that that conception of our institutional life is the true one which regards each of us as a unit but still as a part of a larger unit, which regards each of us as en- titled to liberty but in subordination to law. We have come to regard this as the last les- son of a political philosophy that is based THE MEANING OE EDUCATION 27 upon a study of human history and of human nature. The conception of liberty under the law, allowing a field for every human activity to develop and enrich itself without pulling down its fellow, all cooperating toward a com- mon end, typifies and explains, better than any extreme theory of philosopher or sciolist, the institutional life of the race. We look back and see how that institutional life has been developed. We see the right of private prop- erty, the common law, the state, the church, the freedom of the press, education, — one great institution after another emerging from the mist of indefiniteness and taking its part in the structure of our modern life; and we say at once that no liberal education can be com- plete that does not include some comprehension of all that. Unless the child understands that though he is an individual he is also a member of the body politic, of an institutional life in which he must give and take, defer and obey, adjust and correlate, and that without all this there can be no civilization and no progress, we are thrown back into the condition either of anarchy — the anarchy of Rousseau — or the 28 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION collectivism and stagnation of China, India, and Egypt. We have wrested that institutional life from history and it is going to-day into the education of children all over the civilized world. In this way they are being given their institutional inheritance ; they are being given some insight not alone into their rights, which are so easy to teach, but into their duties, which are so easy to forget ; and the institutional life that carries with it lessons of duty, responsi- bility, and the necessity for cooperation in the working out of high ideals, is being put before children wherever sound education is given to- day, from the kindergarten to the university. Finally, there is the religious inheritance of the child. No student of history can doubt its existence and no observer of human nat- ure will undervalue its significance. We are still far from comprehending fully the pre- ponderant influence of religion in shaping our contemporary civilization ; an influence that is due in part to the universality of religion itself, and in part to the fact that it was, beyond dispute, the chief human interest at the time when the foundations of our present THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 29 superstructure were being laid. It has played a controlling part in education till very re- cently, although it has too often played that part in a narrow, illiberal, and uninformed spirit. The progress of events during the nineteenth century, however, has resulted in greatly altering the relation of the religious influence in education, — at first to education's incalculable gain, and, more recently, to edu- cation's distinct loss. The growing tendency toward what is known as the separation of church and state, but what is more accu- rately described as the independence of man's political and religious relationships, and, con- currently, the development of a public educa- tional conscience which has led the state to take upon itself a large share of the responsi- bility for education, have brought about the practical exclusion of the religious element from public education. This is notably true in France and in the United States. In the state school system of France, all trace of religious instruction has been lacking since 1882; and it is hard to dignify with the names influence or instruction the wretchedly formal 30 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION religious exercises that are gone through with in American public schools. The result of this condition of affairs is that religious teaching is rapidly passing out of education entirely ; and the familiarity with the English Bible as the greatest classic of our tongue, that every cultivated man owes it to himself to possess, is becoming a thing of the past. Two solutions of the difficulty are proposed. One is that the state shall tolerate all existing forms of religious teach- ing in its own schools, time being set apart for the purpose. The other is that the state shall aid, by money grants, schools maintained by religious or other corporations. Neither suggestion is likely to be received favorably by the American people at present, because of the bitterness of the war between the denominational theologies. Yet the religious element may not be permitted to pass wholly out of education unless we are to cripple it and render it hopelessly incomplete. It must devolve upon the family and the church, then, to give this instruction to the child and to preserve the religious insight from loss. Both THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 31 family and church must become much more efficient, educationally speaking, than they are now, if they are to bear this burden success- fully. This opens a series of questions that may not be entered upon here. It is enough to point out that the religious element of hu- man culture is essential ; and that, by some effective agency, it must be presented to every child whose education aims at complete- ness or proportion. The period of infancy is to be used by civil- ized men for adaptation along these five lines, in order to introduce the child to his intellectual and spiritual inheritance, just as the shorter period of infancy in the lower animals is used to develop, to adjust, and to co-ordinate those physical actions which constitute the higher instincts, and which require the larger, the more deeply furrowed, and the more complex brain. That, as it seems to me, is the lesson of biol- ogy, of physiology, and -of psychology, on the basis of the theory of evolution, regarding the meaning and the place of education in modern life. It gives us a conception of education 32 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION which must, I am quite sure, raise it above the mechanical, the routine, the purely arti- ficial. We see that this period of prepara- tion is not a period of haphazard action, a period of possible neglect, or a period when time may be frittered away and lost, but that every moment of adjustment is precious and that every new adaptation and correlation is an enrichment not only of the life of the in- dividual but of the life of the race. For now we all understand perfectly well that this long period of infancy and adaptation, this period of plasticity and education, is that which makes progress possible. That is why it is entirely correct to say that each generation is the trustee of civilization. Each generation owes it to itself and to its posterity to protect its culture, to enrich it and to transmit it. The institution that mankind has worked out for that purpose is the institution known as education. When a child has entered into this inheritance, first physical, then sci^tific, liter- ary, sesthetic, institutional, and religious, then we use the word culture to signify the state that has been attained. THE MEANING OF EDUCATION 33 The word culture is very modern. It is used in its present sense only during the latter portion of the eighteenth century and during our own. It owes its present significance largely to Goethe and to Herder, the two men who did most to make it familiar in its modern sense. But while the word may be new, the conception itself is old. It is the TTaiheia of the Greeks, the humanitas of the Romans ; and after all it expresses pretty much what the patrician Roman, dwelling in his country house, had in mind when he sent his boy, after giving him some instruction in agri- culture, in law, and in military duty, to the great city of Rome itself in order to obtain whanitas, city-ness. We have softened that word down until it means merely polished man- ner, but when the Romans first used it they meant by it pretty much what we mean by culture. The conception of culture is old, therefore ; it has always been before the ideal- ists of the human race from the earliest times. We have given to this new word rich, full, and ^diversified meaning, based, as I say, upon the knowledge of the child and upon the 34 THE MEANING OF EDUCATION knowledge of the historic past. When we use it in that sense, we are using it, as we may properl}^ to indicate the ideal of our modern education. WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH ? Presidential Address delivered before the National Educational Association at Denver, Colorado, July 9, 1895 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH ? The student of history is struck with the complexity of modern thought. From the dawn of philosophy to the great Revival of Learning the lines of development are com- paratively simple and direct. During that period one may trace, step by step, the evolu- tion of the main problems of thought and action, and discover readily how the theories of the seers stood the test of application by the men of deeds. At Athens during the great fifth century the inner life was the chief part of life itself. In that age of the world life was simple ; and often, because of it. refine- ment and independence, more reflective than with us. Men's ideals were more sharply defined and more easily realizable. They did not doubt that the world existed for them and 37 38 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? their enjoyment. Even that relatively advanced stage of human culture of which Dante is the immortal exponent, believed, as Mr. John Fiske says,^ that "this earth, the fair home of man, was placed in the centre of a universe wherein all things were ordained for his sole behoof: the sun to give him light and warmth, the stars in their courses to preside over his strangely checkered destinies, the winds to blow, the floods to rise, or the fiend of pestilence to stalk abroad over the land — all for the blessing, or the warning, or the chiding, of the chief among God's creatures, Man." With such a conception as this, theory and practice could be closely related. In the ancient world it was not unusual to find the thought of the disciple guided implicitly by the maxim of the master. Tvcodi areavTov and Nil admirari were preached by the early philosophers in the confident be- lief that they could be practised by him who would. In these modern days all this is changed. Man has come to doubt not only his supremacy in the universe, but even his importance. He 1 The destiny of man (Boston, 1887), p. 12. WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 39 finds that, far from dwelling at the centre of things, he is but "the denizen of an obscure and tiny speck of cosmical matter quite invisi- ble amid the innumerable throng of flaming suns that make up our galaxy." A flood of new knowledge has appealed to human sympa- thy and interest, and has taxed them to the utmost. Galileo with his telescope has re- vealed to us the infinitely great ; and the com- pound microscope of Jansen has created, as out of nothing, the world of the infinitely small. Within a generation or two biology has been created ; and physics, chemistry, and geology have been born again. The first wave of astonishment and delight at these great revela- tions has been succeeded by one of perplexity and doubt in the presence of the wholly new problems that they raise. The old self-assur- ance is lost. Men first stumble, blinded by the new and unaccustomed light, and then despair. The age of the faith and assured conviction of Aquinas was followed by the bold and cynical scepticism of Montaigne ; and this in turn — for scepticism has never afforded a resting- place for the human spirit for more than a 40 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? moment — has yielded to the philosophy of dis- enchantment and despair of a Schopenhauer and the morbidly acute and unsatisfying self- analysis of an Amiel. Already it is proclaimed by Nordau and his school that we are in an age of decadence, and that many of our contempo- rary interpreters of life and thought — Wag- ner, Tolstoi, Ibsen, Zola, the pre-Raphaelites — are fit subjects for an insane asylum. Man- kind is divided into warring camps, and while electricity and steam have bound the nations of the earth together, questions of knowledge and of belief have split up every nation into sects. In all this tumult it is difficult to catch the sound of the dominant note. Each suggested interpretation seems to lead us further into the tangled maze, where we cannot see the wood for the trees. Standards of truth are more definite than ever before ; but standards of worth are strangely confused, and at times even their existence is denied. Amid all this confusion, however, a light has been growing steadily brighter for those who have eyes to see. In our own century two great masters of thought have come forward, WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WOETH ? 41 offering, like Ariadne of old, to place in our hands the guiding thread that shall lead us through the labyrinth — the German Hegel and the Englishman Herbert Spencer. And as the century closes, amid the din of other and lesser voices, we seem to hear the deeper tones of these two interpreters swelling forth as representative of the best and most earnest endeavors, from two totally different points of view, of human seekers after light. Each has taken the whole of knowledge for his province, each has spread out before us a connected view of man and his environment, and each would "... assert Eternal Providence And justify the ways of God to men." These great teachers typify the catholicity and the scientific method that are so characteristic of the best expressions of our modern civiliza- tion. Whatever of insight we have gained into history, into philosophy, into art, and into nature, they have incorporated in their syste- matic thinking and have endeavored to illumine with the light of their controlling principles. Hegel, schooled in the teachings of Kant and 42 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? Fichte, and coming early to an appreciation of the seed-thought of Plato and Aristotle, Bruno and Spinoza, has taught us in unmistakable language that independent, self -active being is the father of all things. Spencer, feeling the thrill of that unity which makes the cosmos one, and receiving from Lamarck and von Baer the hint that led him to see that the life of the individual furnishes the clew to the understanding of the life of the aggregate, whether natural or social, has formulated into a single and irrefutable law of progress the terms of that development, or evolution, which has been more or less dimly before the mind of man since thought began. The German with his principle of self -activity, and the English- man with his law of evolution, offer us a foot- hold for our knowledge and our faith, and assure us that it will safely support them. From the one we learn the eternal reasonable- ness of all that is or can be, while the other teaches us the character of the process by which the visible universe, that every day pre- sents new wonders to our gaze, has been builded out of the primeval star-dust. At WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 43 their hands the two sublime and awe-inspiring verities of Kant — the starry heavens above and the moral law within — find their places in the life of the spirit, and together testify to its eternity and its beauty. Despite the fact that our age is one of un- exampled scientific and industrial progress, yet nothing in all our modern scientific activ- ity is more striking than the undisputed primacy of thought — thought not in antago- nism to sense, but interpretative of the data of sense. Idealism, shorn of its crudities and its extravagances, and based on reason rather than on Berkeley's analysis of sense- perception, is conquering the world. What Plato saw, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel have demonstrated. The once-dreaded materialism has lost all its terrors. Science itself has analyzed matter into an aggregate of dynamical systems, and speaks of energy in terms of will. The seemingly inert stone that we grasp in our hand is in reality an aggregate of an infinite number of rapidly- moving centres of energy. Our own will is the only energy of whose direct action we 44 WHAT imOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WOETH? are immediately conscious, and we use our experience of it to explain other manifestations of energy to ourselves. Modern mathemat- ics, that most astounding of intellectual crea- tions, has projected the mind's eye through infinite time and the mind's hand into bound- less space. The very instants of the begin- nings of the sun's eclipses are predicted for centuries and seons to come. Sirius, so dis- tant that the light from its surface, travelling at a rate of speed that vies with the light- ning, requires more than eight and one-half years to reach us, is weighed, and its constitu- ents are counted almost as accurately as are the bones of our bodies. Yet in 1842 Comte declared that it was forever impossible to hope to determine the chemical composition or the mineralogical structure of the stars. An unexpected aberration in the motions of Uranus foretold an undiscovered planet at a given spot in the sky, and the telescope of Galle, turned to that precise point, revealed to the astonished senses what was certain to thought. But yesterday a discrepancy in the weight of nitrogen extracted from the air we WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 45 breathe, led Lord Rayleigh, by an inexorable logic, to the discovery of a new atmospheric constituent, argon. The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvellous mathematical method — more daring in its speculations than anything that the history of philosophy records — of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating to-day, as it has never been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason. The great Cayley — who has been given the proud title of the Darwin of the English school of mathematicians — said a few years ago : ^ "I would myself say that the purely imaginary objects are the only realities, the ovrco^ ovra, in regard to which the corresponding physi- cal objects are as the shadows in the cave ; and it is only by means of them that we are able to deny the existence of a correspond- 1 Presidential address, British Association for the Ad- vancement of Science, Southport, 1883. 46 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? ing physical object; and if there is no con- ception of straightness, then it is meaningless to deny the conception of a perfectly straight line." The physicist, also, is coming to see that his principle of the conservation of energy in its various manifestations is a new and star- tling proof of the fundamental philosophical principle of self-activity. Energy manifests itself as motion, heat, light, electricity, chemi- cal action, sound. Each form of its mani- festation is transmutable into others. The self -active cycle is complete. But it is not from the domain of natural science alone that illustrations of the all- conquering power of thought can be drawn. The genius of ChampoUion has called to life the thoughts and deeds of Amenotep and Rameses ; and what appeared to sense as rude decorative sketches on the walls of temple and of tomb are seen by the understanding to be the recorded history of a great civiliza- tion in the valley of the Nile. The inscruta- ble Sphinx, that watchdog of the Pyramids, " unchangeable in the midst of change," which WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WOETH? 47 sat facing the coming dawn for centuries before the storied siege of Troy, now looks down on modern men who write the very words of its builders in the language of Shakspere and of Milton. The cries of sav- age man, the language-symbols of the early Aryans, and the multiform and complicated tongues of modern Europe, all so seemingly diverse to the ear and to the eye, have been the foundation for the sure laws of compara- tive philology that the labors of Bopp and Grimm and Verner have erected upon them. All these, and the many triumphs like them, are victories of insight ; each marks a new stage in the conquering progress of the reason, by which it finds itself in every part and in every phase of the cosmos and its life. The insight as to self -activity and the pri- macy of reflective thought, I regard as the profoundest that philosophy has to offer ; and, instead of being urged, as in centuries past, in antagonism to the teachings of science, it is now becoming the joint conclusion of philoso- phy and science together. It is thought that 48 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? pulsates in the world's grandest poetry and in its most exquisite art. It is the very soul of the verse of Homer and of Dante, of Shaks- pere and of Goethe. It makes the marble of Phidias glow with life, and it guides the hand of Raphael and Michael Angelo as they trace their wondrous figures with the brush. It gives immortality to the most beautiful of temples, the Parthenon; and it is the inspi- ration of that superb mediaeval architecture, which bears the name of the conquerors of Rome, and which has given to Northern Europe its grandest monuments to the reli- gious aspiration and devotion of the Middle Ages. What, then, does this primacy of thought signify, and what is its bearing upon our educa- tional ideals ? Obviously the possession of a conclusion such as this, wrested from nature by the hand of science and from history by that of philosophy, must serve in many ways to guide us in estimating the importance of human insti- tutions and of educational instruments. We cannot accept either of these, without question, from the hands of a tradition to which our WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OE MOST WORTH? 49 modern philosophy and our modern science were wholly unknown; nor can we blindly follow those believers in a crude psychology who would present us with so many mental facul- ties to be trained, each by its appropriate formal exercise, as if they were sticks of wood to be shaped and reduced to symmetry and order. Mental life, as Wundt so forcibly says, " does not consist in the connection of unalterable objects and varying conditions : in all its phases it is process ; an active, not a pas- sive, existence ; development, not stagnation." ^ Herein is mental life true to nature. Like nature, it is not fixed, but ever changing, and this unceasing change, necessary to both growth and development, gives to life both its reality and its pathos. It gives also to edu- cation its unending character, and to mankind the clew to education's wisest processes. The question that I am asking — what knowledge is of most worth? — is a very old one, and the answers to it which have been handed down through the centuries are many ^ Lectures on human and animal psychology (New York, 1894), p. 454. 50 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? and various. It is a question which each age must put to itself, and answer from the stand- point of its deepest and widest knowledge. The wisest philosophers have always seen, more or less clearly, the far-reaching character of the question and the great importance of the answer. Socrates and Plato, Augustine and Aquinas, were under no illusions as to it ; but often in later years the deeper questions relating to the relative worth of subjects of study have been either entirely lost sight of or very superficially dealt with. Bacon clothes in attractive axiomatic form some very crude judgments as to the relative worth of studies. Rousseau outlines an educational programme that ruined his reputation for sobriety of judg- ment. Herbert Spencer turns aside for a moment from his life-work to apotheosize sci- ence in education, although science is, by his own definition, only partially unified know- ledge. Whewell exalts mathematics in lan- guage only less extravagant than that in which Sir William Hamilton decries it. In similar fashion, others, holding a brief for some par- ticular phase or department of knowledge, WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 51 have come forward crying Eureka ! and pro- claiming that the value of all studies must be measured in terms of their newly-discovered standard. The very latest cry is that studies and intellectual exercises are valuable in pro- portion as they stimulate enlarged brain-areas, thus making the appreciation of Shakspere, of Beethoven, and of Leonardo da Vinci solely a function of the circulation of the blood. But to sciolists of this type philosophy and science can now make common answer. If it be true that spirit and reason rule the uni- verse, then the highest and most enduring knowledge is of the things of the spirit. That subtle sense of the beautiful and the sublime which accompanies spiritual insight, and is part of it, — this is the highest achievement of which humanity is capable. It is typified, in various forms, in the verse of Dante and the prose of Thomas a Kempis, in the Sistine Madonna of Raphael, and in Mozart's Re- quiem. To develop this sense in education is the task of art and literature, to interpret it is the work of philosophy, and to nourish it the function of religion. Because it most 52 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? fully represents the higher nature of man, it is man's highest possession, and those studies that directly appeal to it and instruct it are beyond compare the most valuable. This has been eloquently and beautifully illustrated by Brother Azarias. " Take a Raphael or a Murillo," he says.^ "We gaze upon the painted canvas till its beauty has entered our soul. The splendor of the beauty lights up within us depths unrevealed, and far down in our inner consciousness we discover something that responds to the beauty on which we have been gazing. It is as though a former friend revealed himself to us. There is here a recog- nition. The more careful has been our sense- culture, the more delicately have our feelings been attuned to respond to a thing of beauty and find in it a joy forever, all the sooner and the more intensely do we experience this recog- nition. And therewith comes a vague yearn- ing, a longing as for something. What does it all mean? The recognition is of the ideal." Toward the full recognition and appreciation ^Phases of thought and criticism (New York, 1892), pp. 57, 68. WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 53 of this insight into the great works of the spirit, whether recorded in literature, in art, or in institutional life, higher education should bend all its energies. The study of philosophy itself, or the truly philosophic study of any department of knowledge — however remote its beginnings may seem to be — will accomplish this end. The ways of approach to this goal are as many as there are human interests, for they are all bound together in the bonds of a common origin and a common purpose. The attainment of it is true culture, as Matthew Arnold has defined it : " the acquainting our- selves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit." ^ We now come in sight of the element of truth and permanence in that Humanism which Pe- trarch and Erasmus spread over Europe with such high hopes and excellent intentions ; but which Sturm, the Strassburg schoolmaster, re- duced to the dead, mechanical forms and the crude verbalism that bound the schools in fet- ters for centuries. Of Humanism itself we 1 Preface to Literature and dogma (New York, 1889), p. xi. 54 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? may say, as Pater says of the Renaissance of the fifteenth century, that " it was great rather by what it designed than by what it achieved. Much which it aspired to do, and did but im- perfectly or mistakenly, was accomplished in what is called the Selaircissement of the eigh- teenth century, or in our own generation ; and what really belongs to the revival of the fif- teenth century is but the leading instinct, the curiosity, the initiatory idea."^ Many of the representative Humanists were broad-minded men whose sympathies were with learning of every kind. Erasmus himself writes with enthusiasm of other branches of know- ledge than literature. "Learning," he says, " is springing up all around out of the soil ; languages, physics, mathematics, each depart- ment thriving. Even theology is showing signs of improvement." 2 But unfortunately this broad sympathy with every field of knowledge was not yet widespread. The wonders and splendor of nature that had brought into exist- 1 Pater, The renaissance (New York, 1888), p. 34. 2 Eroude, Life and letters of Erasmus (New York, 1894), p. 186. WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 55 ence the earliest religions and the earliest phi- losophies were now feared and despised as the basis of paganism ; and on wholly false grounds a controversy was precipitated as to the relative worth of literature and of science that in one form or another has continued down to our own day. The bitterness with which the con- troversy has been carried on, and the extreme positions assumed by the partisans of the one side or the other, have concealed from view the truth that we are now able to perceive clearly — the truth that the indwelling reason, by whom all things are made, is as truly present, though in a different order of manifestation, in the world of nature as in the world of spirit. One side of this truth was expressed by Schel- ling when he taught that nature is the em- bryonic life of spirit, and by Froebel when he wrote, " The spirit of God rests in nature, lives and reigns in nature, is expressed in nature, is communicated by nature, is developed and cul- tivated in nature." 1 The controversy as to the educational value of science, so far, at least, 1 Education of man, translated by W. N. Hailmann, (New York, 1887), p. 154. bQ WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? as it concerns educational standards and ideals, is, then, an illusory one. It is a mimic war, with words alone as weapons, that is fought either to expel nature from education or to subordinate all else in education to it. We should rather say, in the stately verse of Milton : " Accuse not Nature : she hath, done her part ; Do thou but thme." And that part is surely to study nature joy- fully, earnestly, reverently, as a mighty mani- festation of the power and grandeur of the same spirit that finds expression in human achievement. We must enlarge, then, our conception of the humanities, for humanity is broader and deeper than we have hitherto sus- pected. It touches the universe at many more points than one ; and, properly interpreted, the study of nature may be classed among the humanities as truly as the study of language itself. This conclusion, which would welcome sci- ence with open arms into the school and util- ize its opportunities and advantages at every WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 57 stage of education, does not mean that all studies are of equal educational value, or that they are mutually and indifferently inter- changeable, as are the parts of some machines. It means rather that the study of nature is entitled to recognition on grounds similar to those put forward for the study of literature, of art, and of history. But among themselves these divisions of knowledge fall into an order of excellence as educational material that is determined by their respective relations to the development of the reflective reason. The application of this test must inevitably lead us, while honoring science and insisting upon its study, to place above it the study of his- tory, of literature, of art, and of institutional life. But these studies may not for a moment be carried on without the study of nature or in neglect of it. They are all humanities in the truest sense, and it is a false philosophy of education that would cut us off from any one of them or that would deny the common ground on which they rest. In every field of knowledge which we are studying is some law or phase of energy, and the original as well as 58 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? the highest energy is will. In the world of nature it is exhibited in one series of forms, those which produce the results known to us as chemical, physical, biological ; in the history of mankind, it is manifested in the forms of feelings, thoughts, deeds, institutions. Because the elements of self-consciousness and reflection are present in the latter series and absent in the former, it is to these and the knowledge of them that we must accord the first place in any table of educational values. But education, as Mr. Froude has reminded us,^ has two aspects. " On one side it is the cultivation of man's reason, the development of his spiritual nature. It elevates him above the pressure of material interests. It makes him superior to the pleasures and pains of a world which is but his temporary home, in filling his mind with higher subjects than the occupations of life would themselves provide him with." It is this aspect of education that I have been considering, for it is from this aspect that we derive our inspiration and our 1 Short studies on great subjects (New York, 1872), II, 267. WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 59 ideals. "But," continues Mr. Froude, "a life of speculation to the multitude would be a life of idleness and uselessness. They have to maintain themselves in industrious inde- pendence in a world in which it has been said there are but three possible modes of existence — begging, stealing, and working ; and education means also the equipping a man with means to earn his own living." It is this latter and very practical aspect of edu- cation that causes us to feel at times the full force of the question of worth in education. Immediate utility makes demands upon the school which it is unable wholly to neglect. If the school is to be the training-ground for citizenship, its products must be usefully and soundly equipped as well as well disciplined and well informed. An educated proletariat — to use the forcible paradox of Bismarck — is a continual source of disturbance and dan- ger to any nation. Acting upon this convic- tion, the great modern democracies — and the time seems to have come when a democracy may be defined as a government, of any form, in which public opinion habitually rules — are 60 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? everywhere having a care that in education provision be made for the practical, or immedi- ately useful. This is as it should be, but it exposes the school to a new series of dangers against which it must guard. Utility is a term that may be given either a very broad or a very narrow meaning. There are utilities higher and utilities lower, and under no cir- cumstances will the true teacher ever permit the former to be sacrificed to the latter. This would be done if, in its zeal for fitting the child for self-support, the school were to neg- lect to lay the foundation for that higher intellectual and spiritual life which consti- tutes humanity's full stature. This founda- tion is made ready only if proper emphasis be laid, from the kindergarten to the college, on those studies whose subject-matter is the direct product of intelligence and will, and which can, therefore, make direct appeal to man's higher nature. The sciences and their applications are capable of use, even from the standpoint of this higher order of utilities, because of the reason they exhibit and reveal. Man's rational freedom is the goal, and the WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 61 sciences are the lower steps on the ladder that reaches to it. A splendid confirmation of this view of sci- ence is found in the great Belfast address in which Professor Tyndall stormed the strong- holds of prejudice one and twenty years ago. Said Professor Tyndall : ^ " Science itself not unf requently derives motive power from an ultra-scientific source. Some of its greatest discoveries have been made under the stimulus of a non-scientific ideal. This was the case amongst the ancients, and it has been so amongst ourselves. Mayer, Joule, and Colding, whose names are associated with the greatest of modern generalizations, were thus influenced. With his usual insight, Lange at one place re- marks that ^it is not always the objectively cor- rect and intelligible that helps man most, or leads most quickly to the fullest and truest knowledge. As the sliding body upon the brachystochrone reaches its end sooner than by the straighter road of the inclined plane, so through the swing of the ideal we often arrive at the naked truth more rapidly than by the more direct processes of the understanding.' Whewell speaks of en- 1 Presidential address, British Association for the Ad- vancement of Science, Belfast, 1874. 62 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OE MOST WORTH? thusiasm of temper as a hindrance to science; but lie means the enthusiasm of weak heads. There is a strong and resolute enthusiasm in which science finds an ally ; and it is to the lowering of this fire, rather than to the diminu- tion of intellectual insight, that the lessening productiveness of men of science in their mature years is to be ascribed. Mr. Buckle sought to detach intellectual achievement from moral force. He gravely erred; for without moral force to whip it into action, the achievements of the in- tellect would be poor indeed. *'It has been said that science divorces itself from literature; but the statement, like so many others, arises from lack of knowledge. A glance at the less technical writings of its leaders — of its Helmholtz, its Huxley, and its du Bois-Keymond — would show what breadth of literary culture they command. Where among modern writers can you find their superiors in clearness and vigor of liter- ary style ? Science desires not isolation, but freely combines with every effort toward the bettering of man^s estate. Single-handed, and supported not by outward sympathy, but by inward force, it has built at least one great wing of the many-man- sioned home which man in his totality demands. And if rough walls and protruding rafter-ends in- dicate that on one side the edifice is still incom- plete, it is only by wise combination of the parts WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 63 required with, those already irrevocably built that we can hope for completeness. There is no neces- sary incongruity between what has been accom- plished and what remains to be done. The moral glow of Socrates, which we all feel by ignition, has in it nothing incompatible with the physics of Anaxagoras which he so much scorned, but which he would hardly scorn to-day. . . . ^' The world embraces not only a Newton, but a Shakspere — not only a Boyle, but a Eaphael — not only a Kant, but a Beethoven — not only a Darwin, but a Carlyle. Not in each of these, but in all, is human nature whole. They are not opposed, but supplementary — not mutually exclusive, but recon- cilable. And if, unsatisfied with, them all, the human mind, with the yearning of a pilgrim for his distant home, will still turn to the Mystery from which it has emerged, seeking so to fashion it as to give unity to thought and faith, so long as this is done, not only without intolerance or bigotry of any kind, but with the enlightened recognition that ultimate fixity of conception is here unattain- able, and that each, succeeding age must be held free to fashion the mystery in accordance with its own needs — then, casting aside all the restrictions of Materialism, I would affirm this to be a field for the noblest exercise of what, in contrast with the knowing faculties, may be called the creative facul- ties of man." 64 WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? Close as are man's structural relations to the lower animals, his equipment is peculiar to himself. The actions of the lower animals are conditioned by sensations and momentary im- pulses. Man, on the other hand, is enabled to raise himself above fleeting sensations to the realm of ideas, and in that realm he finds his real life. Similarly, man's will gradually frees itself from bondage to a chain of causes deter- mined for it from without, and attains to a power of independent self-determination ac- cording to durable and continuing ends of action. This constitutes character, which, in Emerson's fine phrase, is the moral order seen through the medium of an individual nature. Freedom of the will is not, then, a metaphysical notion, nor is it obtained from nature or seen in nature. It is a development in the life of the human soul. Freedom and rationality are two names for the same thing, and their high- est development is the end of human life. This development is not, as Locke thought, a process arising without the mind and acting upon it, a passive and pliable recipient. Much less is it one that could be induced in the WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? 65 hypothetical statue of Condillac and Bonnet. It is the very life of the soul itself. There is a striking passage in The Mar- hie Faun in which Hawthorne suggests the idea that the task of the sculptor is not, by carving, to impress a figure upon the marble, but rather, by the touch of genius, to set free the glorious form that the cold grasp of the stone imprisons. With similar insight, Brown- ing puts these words into the mouth of his Paracelsus : " Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no rise From outward things, whate'er you may beheve. There is an inmost centre in us all, Where truth abides in fullness ; and around, Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, This perfect, clear perception. . . . . . . And, to know, Rather consists in opening out a way Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape. Than in effecting entry for a light Supposed to be without." This is the poetical form of the truth that I believe is pointed to by both philosophy and science. It offers us a sure standing-ground for our educational theory. It reveals to us, 6Q WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH? not as an hypothesis but as a fact, education as spiritual growth toward intellectual and moral perfection, and saves us from the peril of view- ing it as an artificial process according to me- chanical formulas. Finally, it assures us that while no knowledge is worthless, — for it all leads us back to the common cause and ground of all, — yet that knowledge is of most worth which stands in closest relation to the highest forms of the activity of that spirit which is created in the image of Him who holds nature and man alike in the hollow of his hand. IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? Presidential Address delivered before the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Middle States and Maryland, at Easton, Pennsylvania, November 29, 1 895 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? The title of this discussion is designedly thrown into the form of a question. Its pur- pose is to provoke, if possible, a difference of opinion — always a healthier and more produc- tive intellectual state than the dull mediocrity of agreement. Difference of opinion begets doubt, doubt begets inquiry, and inquiry event- ually leads to truth. Virgil's fine line, Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, is profoundly true ; but more fortunate still is he who comes to his knowledge by the sure method of honest doubt. For a generation we have been doing lip-ser- vice to the doctrine of evolution ; but only with great slowness and difficulty do old forms of speech and old habits of mind fit themselves to a new point of view that makes so strong an 69 70 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? appeal both to our reason and to our imagina- tion. In no department of knowledge is this more true than in the field of education. Edu- cation is essentially a conservative process ; it cherishes its time-worn instruments and re- veres its time-honored standards. The treas- ures of the mind are too precious to be lightly exposed to the loss or harm that might come to them through change. Yet the opinion has found lodgment among our craft that after all, and despite the excellence of old methods and old standards, the educational theory and prac- tice of a given age or generation must stand in close relation to its intellectual and ethical ideals and to the material fabric of its civiliza- tion : and surely all three of these habitually vary, not only over long periods but in rela- tively short intervals of time. It is a grave matter for the teacher if virtue is identical with knowledge, as Socrates taught ; or if it is the result of habit, as Aristotle held ; or if it is the cunning invention of rulers, as Mandeville sug- gested ; or if it is mere skill in calculating the chances of pleasure and pain, as Bentham laid down. It is important, too, primarily for the IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 71 higher education, but eventually for the lower schools as well, if our intellectual ideal is repre- sented by the active mind of a Leibniz or a Gladstone, with its immense energy and broad range of interests ; or if it is better typified by the narrow, plodding specialization of a Darwin or of those Teutonic philologers who are un- duly distracted if their investigations cover more than the gerund or the dative case. Still more directly must our education depend upon the material equipment of the time. In this day of innumerable printing-presses, with a power of production sadly out of proportion to their power of discrimination, it is quite incon- ceivable that we should not find ourselves forced to con anew the grounds on which rest the principles and methods that have come down to us from the age of manuscripts and pack-saddles. Such a process of questioning has been under way for some time past, and has contributed in no small degree to that marvellous enthusiasm for education and to that belief in it, the evidences of which are to be seen on every hand. There are three avenues of scientific ap- 72 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? proach to the study of education, and in each of them the evolutionary point of view is not only illuminating but controlling. These three avenues are the physiological, the psychologi- cal, and the sociological. Their points of con- tact are many and their inter-relations are close. Modern psychology has already given up the attempt to treat mental life without reference to its physical basis ; and it will sooner or later regard any interpretation as incomplete that does not relate the individual to what may be called the social life or con- sciousness. Man's institutional life is as much a part of his real self as his physical existence or his mental constitution. Robinson Orusoe is, in one of the catch phrases of the day, a barren ideality. It must be admitted that this point of view is both very old and very new. It is very old, for it was Aristotle himself who wrote, " Man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature, and not by mere accident, is without a state, is either above humanity or below it."^ It is also very new, for it is in flat contradic- ^ The politics of Aristotle, I, 2, Jowett's translation (Ox- ford, 1885), p. 4. IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 73 tion to the doctrine of Rousseau, " Compelled to oppose nature or our social institutions, we must choose between making a man and a citizen, for we cannot make both at once " ^ — the crudeness and superficiality of which have not prevented it from exercising a wide and long-continued influence. Modern philosophy confirms here, as so often, the analysis of Aris- totle ; and it rejects, as is becoming customary, the extreme individualism of the later eigh- teenth century. The significance of this for our educational theory is all-important. Returning now to the first of the three pillars on which the modern study of education rests — the physiological — it may be useful to recall briefly what consideration has been given to it in the past. All of the older culture- nations laid stress upon it, and some of them dealt with it in systematic fashion. But the Greeks alone understood the educational value of play. Their great national games combined systematic physical training and play in a way that we have not yet succeeded in equalling. 1 Rousseau's ^mile, translated by W. H. Payne (New York, 1893), p. 5. 74 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? The ascetic ideal that ruled the schools of the Middle Ages left no place for a continuance of the Greek practice, and it was forgotten. We find ourselves to-day struggling to imitate it. In Germany systematic physical training is made much of in education, but genuine play is not prominent. In England, on the contrary, play has been found so successful in developing strength and suppleness of body and sturdy, independent character that anything approach- ing systematic, formal training is regarded as almost unnecessary. In this country the pres- ent tendency is to develop both elements, after the fashion of the Greeks ; and it is to be hoped that the outcome will be even more satisfactory than it was at Athens and at Corinth. But physical and physiological considera- tions cut far deeper than this. They demand a hearing when we have under discussion questions of school hours and recesses, of pro- grammes and tasks, of school furniture, of text- books and blackboards, of light, heat, and fresh air. On all of these topics we have recently learned much that has not yet found its way into our practice. College faculties and school IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 75 teachers, framers of examination tests, donors of laboratories and dormitories, and, most of all, architects, are as a rule oblivious to the vital interest that the pupil has in matters of this kind. Considerations of tradition, conven- ience, cost, and external appearance are al- lowed full swing, and the growing youth must fit the Procrustean bed as best they can. The signs of mal-nutrition and weakness, as de- scribed, for example, by Warner, and the laws of mental and physical fatigue, as arrived at by such investigations as those of Mosso and of Burgerstein, are about as familiar to teach- ers in colleges and in preparatory schools as are the Laws of Manu. And yet they affect vi- tally every young man or young woman who enters a schoolroom or a college. No amount of thundering eloquence on the value of the ancient classics, no emphasis on character as the sole end of education, can make amends for our failure to study the facts dealing with the physical and physiological elements in edu- cation, and for our delay in applying them. We need to be strongly reminded that wicked- ness is closely akin to weakness, and then to 76 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? consider the moral consequences of our physio- logical ignorance.^ The relation of psychology to education is the one subject on which the teacher of to-day is supposed to be informed. Normal schools without number, and here and there a college, give definite instruction in the subject. Yet a careful inspection of the most popular text- books in use, and visits to some hundreds of classrooms, have convinced me that the results of this knowledge, if it exists, are, in the field of secondary and higher education, almost nil. In this respect the elementary teacher is far in advance. Perhaps no secondary school or college in America can show teaching to com- pare, in mastery of scientific method and in technical skill, with the best teaching to be seen in many of the public elementary schools, particularly in the Western States. In con- sequence of this, we may safely assume that pupils fresh from the vigorous intellectual and moral growth of a well-conducted elementary school, will turn aside from the machine meth- 1 Compare "Moral education and will -training," by G. Stanley Hall, in Pedagogical Seminary, II, 72-89. IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 77 ods and dull, uninspiring class-exercises of our average academy with disgust. The new edu- cational life-blood is flowing most freely and vigorously in the veins of the elementary teacher. Here and there a secondary school- master, and here and there a college president or professor, takes a genuine and intelligent interest in education for its own sake; but the vast majority know nothing of it and are but little affected by it. They are content to accumulate what they are pleased to term " ex- perience"; but their relation to education is just that of the motorman on a trolley-car to the science of electricity. They use it ; but of its nature, principles, and processes they are profoundly ignorant. The one qualifica- tion most to be feared in a teacher, and the one to be most carefully inquired into, is this same "experience" when it stands alone. I am profoundly distrustful of it. The pure empiricist never can have any genuine experi- ence, any more than an animal, because he is unable to interrogate the phenomena that pre- sent themselves to him, and hence is unable to understand them. The scientific teacher, the 78 IS THEKE A NEW EDUCATION? theorist, on the contrary, asks what manner of phenomena these are that are before him, what are their inner relations, and the princi- ples on which they are based. This, of course, is the first great step, taken by all scientific method, toward a knowledge of causes. It is at this point that we reach the real reason for the need of an accurate knowledge of psychology on the part of the teacher. His dealings in the schoolroom are primarily with mental processes and mental growth. Unless these are scientifically studied and understood, or — -and this does not happen often — unless natural psychological insight comes to the res- cue of psychological ignorance, the teaching is bound to be mechanical ; and the longer it is continued, the more " experience " is ac- quired, and the more wooden and mechanical it becomes. A short time ago I was present at an exer- cise in modern history, given to an undergrad- uate class, averaging over eighteen years of age, in one of our Eastern colleges. The text-book in the hands of the students was of a very elementary character, and is much IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 79 used in public high schools, both East and West. The teacher was a college graduate, and had held his position for several years. These years had been years of "experience," and would have been strongly urged as an important qualification had his name been under consideration for promotion or for trans- fer to another institution. Yet the entire hour that I spent in his class was given up to the dictation of an abstract of the text- book. This, he told me, was his usual method. The students took down the dictation, word for word, in a dull, listless way, and gave a sigh of mingled despair and relief when it came to an end. This process went on sev- eral times weekly for either one or two years. I ascertained from the instructor that he called it "hammering the facts home." He is, for aught I know, "hammering" yet, and now has some additional " experience " to his credit. So have his pupils. Not long ago a prominent publishing firm issued a widely advertised text-book on a subject much taught nowadays. For the pur- poses of real teaching, of arousing interest and 80 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? enthusiasm in the subject, and of stimulating the student to pursue it farther, to reflect upon it, and to make its lessons his own, it was as ill-adapted as any printed matter occupying the same number of pages could be. As a compendium of bare facts and dates to be committed to memory, and reproduced in an- swer to definite questions, it was clear and concise. Despite this fact, the publishers have recently issued a circular commendatory of the book, that contains two-score cordial in- dorsements of it as a text-book, over the sig- natures of as many high-school and college teachers. I interpret that to mean that those two-score teachers lack either educational intel- ligence or educational conscience ; perhaps both. No amount of psychological learning could make it impossible for the inquirer to find cases like these, and the hundreds of others of which they are typical, in the schools and colleges ; but a psychological training on the part of the teacher would go far to diminish their number. Professor Royce pointed out ^ 1 " Is there a science of education ? " in Educational Be- view, I, 15-25 ; 121-132. IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 81 several years ago that what the teacher has chiefly to gain from the study of psychology is, not rules of procedure, but the psychologi- cal spirit. The teacher, he adds, should be a naturalist and cultivate the habit of observing the mental life of his pupils for its own sake. In this he will follow the method common to all naturalists : " What is here in this live thing ? Why does it move thus ? What is it doing ? What feelings does it appear to have ? What type of rudimentary intelligence is it showing ? " Such questions as these form the habit of watching minds, and of watching them closely. This habit is the surest road to good teaching, and its formation is the best service that psychology can render to the classroom. Until a teacher has acquired that habit and subordinated his schoolroom procedure to it, he is not teaching at all ; at best he is either lecturing or hearing recitations. We are chiefly indebted to the students and followers of Herbart for the present wide- spread interest in this country in two psycho- logical doctrines of the greatest importance 82 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? for all teaching — the doctrine of appercep- tion and the doctrine of interest. The former has to do with mental assimilation, the latter with the building of character and ideals. I know of no more fruitful field for the appli- cation of both of these than the freshman year of the college course. My observation has taught me that the work of the freshman class in college is, as a rule, very ineffective. College teachers who admit this fact are in the habit of accounting for it by alleging the difficulty of welding into a homogeneous mass the new students of different advantages, training, and mental habits. The task is more than difficult ; it is impossible, and ought never to be attempted, much less en- couraged. That it goes on year after year in a hundred colleges is due to the strait- jacket system of class teaching by which we defy the rules of God and man to the glory of what, in our professional cant, we call " sound education." If we could secure a hearing for the doctrine of apperception, all this would be changed. We should then recog- nize in our practice as we do in our faith IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 83 that the mind is not a passive recipient of the impressions that reach it ; that it reacts upon them, colors them, and makes them a part of itself in accordance with the ten- dency, the point of view, and the possessions that it already has. This tendency, this point of view, and these possessions differ in the case of every individual. Instead of over- looking or seeking to annul these differences, we should first understand them and then base our teaching upon them. If the first month of freshman year were spent in care- fully ascertaining the stage of development, in power and acquirement, that each pupil had reached, it would be possible so to order and adjust the work of the year as to make it useful and educative. I have known case after case in which the opposite policy of treating all upon one plane, and making the same demands upon all, has made a college course a source of positive harm ; it also accounts, in greater measure than we are aware of, for the large proportion of students who fall away at the end of the freshman and sophomore years. Yet so long as college 84 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? ' teachers know so little psychology as to cling to the old dogma of formal discipline, and continue to pound away on so much mathe- matics to train the reasoning powers and so much Greek grammar to train something else, regardless of the content of the instruction and of all other considerations — just so long will one mind be lost or injured for every one that is saved or benefited. As Colonel Parker has so forcibly said, "We dwell on those who have been saved by our older methods, but who has counted the lost ? " The situation is not very different with re- spect to the doctrine of interest. We con- tinually complain that valuable and necessary instruction given in school and in college is for- gotten, that it is not retained, not extended, and not applied. The fault lies partly, no doubt, with the pupils, but largely with ourselves. We have still to learn what interest means, how it is changed from indirect to direct, and how it is built up into a permanent element of character. We are inexperienced in seeking out and seizing upon the present and tempo- rary interests of the student, and in using IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 85 them as a factor in training. It is a com- mon thing to hear it said that since life is full of obstacles and character is strength- ened by overcoming them, so the school and college course should not hesitate to compel students to do distasteful and difficult things simply because they are distasteful and diffi- cult. I do not hesitate to say that I believe that doctrine to be profoundly immoral and its consequences calamitous. But, it is an- swered, you certainly would not trust to a student's whims and allow him to do or not do as he pleases. Certainly not ; and that is not the alternative. The proper and scien- tific course is to search for the pupil's em- pirical and natural interests, and to build upon them. This is not always easy; it re- quires knowledge, patience, and skill. It is far easier to treat the entire class alike and to drive them over the hurdles set by a sin- gle required course of study, in the vain hope that the weak and timid will not be injured as much as the strong and confident will be benefited, and that somehow or other the algebraic sum of the results of the process 86 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? will bear a positive sign. I earnestly com- mend to every teacher the study of these two principles, apperception and interest. I do so in the firm belief that the practical result of that study would be an immense uplifting of the teaching efficiency of every educational institution in the United States. What, for lack of a better term, I call the sociological aspect of education is, in many respects, the most important of all. Under this head are to be put such questions as those that deal with the aim and limits of education, its relation to the state, its organization and administration, and the course of study to be pursued. I can now refer to but a single one of these topics. Dr. Harris, in the opening para- graphs of his well-known report on the correla- tion of studies, dealt a final blow to the idea that the course of study is to be settled either by tradition or by conditions wholly psycho- logical. " The game of chess," he points out,^ " would furnish a good course of study for the discipline of the powers of attention and calcu- 1 Beport of the Committee of Fifteen on elementary edu- cation (New York, 1895), p. 42. IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 87 lation of abstract combinations, but it would give its possessor little or no knowledge of man or nature. . . . Psychology of both kinds, physiological and introspective, can hold only a subordinate place in the settlement of questions relating to the correlation of stud- ies." He also shows that the chief considera- tion to which all others are to be subordinated is the "requirement of the civilization into which the child is born, as determining not only what he shall study in school, but what habits and customs he shall be taught in the family before the school age arrives ; as well as that he shall acquire a skilled acquaintance with some one of a definite series of trades, profes- sions, or vocations in the years that follow school ; and, furthermore, that this question of the relation of the pupil to his civilization de- termines what political duties he shall assume and what religious faith or spiritual aspirations shall be adopted for the conduct of his life."^ It is at this point that the study of education from the sociological point of view begins. 1 Beport of the Committee of Fifteen on elementary edu- cation (New York, 1895), p. 41. 88 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? Instead of forcing the course of study to suit the necessities of some preconceived system of educational organization, it should deter- mine and control that organization absolutely. Were this done, the troubles of the secondary school, the Cinderella of our educational system, would disappear. Just at present it is jammed into the space left between the elementary school and the college, without any rational and ordered relation to either. The ever-present problem of college entrance is purely artificial, and has no business to exist at all. We have ingeniously created it, and are much less in- geniously trying to solve it. Leibniz might have said that mental development, as well as nature, never makes leaps. It is constant and continuous. The idea that there is a great gulf fixed between the sixteenth and seventeenth years, or between the seventeenth and eigh- teenth, that nothing but a college entrance ex- amination can bridge, is a mere superstition that not even age can make respectable. It ought to be as easy and natural for the student to pass from the secondary school to the college as it is for him to pass from one class to another in the IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 89 school or in the college. In like fashion, the work and methods of the one ought to lead easily and gradually to those of the other. That they do not do so in the educational systems of France and Germany is one of the main defects of those systems. The American college as a school of broad and liberal education, a place where studies are carried on with reference to their general and more far-reaching relations, is indispensable for the very reason that it per- mits and encourages the expansion and devel- opment of school work in the widest possible way, before the narrow specialization of the university is entered upon. Happily, there are in the United States no artificial obstacles in- terposed between the college and the univer- sity. We make it very easy to pass from the one to the other ; the custom is to accept any college degree for just what it means. We make it equally easy to pass from one grade or class to another and from elementary school to secondary school, the presumption always being that the pupils are ready and competent to go forward. The barrier between secondary school and college is the only one that we insist upon 90 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? retaining. The intending collegian alone is required to run the gantlet of college pro- fessors and tutors, who, in utter ignorance of his character, training, and acquirements, bruise him for hours with such knotty ques- tions as their fancy may suggest. In the interest of an increased college attendance, not to mention that of a sounder educational theory, this practice ought to be stopped and the formal tests at entrance reduced to a minimum. Public opinion itself, despite the protests of the pundits of the faculties, is forcing an ex- tension of the course of study. It is one of the best bits of grim humor that our American practice, inherited from the mother country, affords, that the designation "liberal" has come to be claimed as the sole prerogative of a very narrow and technical course of study that was invented for a very narrow and technical purpose, and that has been very imperfectly liberalized in the intervening centuries. It ought to soften somewhat the asperity of teachers of Greek to remember that the very arguments by which they are in the habit of IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 91 resisting the inroads of the modern languages, the natural sciences, and economics, were used not so many hundreds of years ago to keep Greek itself from edging its way into the cur- riculum at all. Paulsen is indubitably right in his insistence upon the fact that the modern world has developed a culture of its own, which, while an outgrowth of the culture of antiquity, is quite distinct from it. It is to this modern culture that our education must lead. The first question to be asked of any course of study is. Does it lead to a knowledge of our contemporary civilization ? If not, it is neither efficient nor liberal. In society as it exists to-day the dominant note, running through all of our struggles and problems, is economic, — what the old Greeks might have called political. Yet it is a con- stant fight to get any proper teaching from the economic and social point of view put before high-school and college students. They are considered too young or too immature to study such recondite subjects, although the nice dis- tinctions between the Greek moods and tenses and the principles of conic sections, with their 92 IS THEEE A NEW EDUCATION? appeal to the highly trained mathematical imagination, are their daily food. As a result, thousands of young men and young women, who have neither the time, the money, nor the desire for a university career, are sent forth from the schools either in profound ignorance of the economic basis of modern society, or with only the most superficial and misleading knowledge of it. The indefensibleness of this policy, even from the most practical point of view, is apparent when we bear in mind that in this country we are in the habit of submitting questions, primarily economic in character, every two or four years to the judgment and votes of what is substantially an untutored mob. If practical politics only dealt with chemistry as well as with economics, we could, by the same short and easy method, come to some definite and authoritative conclusion con- cerning the atomic theory and learn the real facts regarding helium. But since the eco- nomic facts, and not the chemical or linguistic facts, are the ones to be bound up most closely with our public and private life, they should, on that very account, be strongly represented IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? 93 in every curriculum. We can leave questions as to the undulatory theory of light and as to Grimm's and Verner's laws to the specialists ; but we may not do the same thing with ques- tions as to production and exchange, as to monetary policy and taxation. The course of study is not liberal, in this century, that does not recognize these facts and empha- size economics as it deserves. I cite but this one instance of conflict between the inherited and the scientifically constructed course of study. The argument and its illustration might be much extended. I have now indicated how I should answer my own question, and have briefly pointed out typical grounds on which that answer rests. There remains the ungracious duty of adding a word regarding the attitude of college facul- ties and schoolmasters toward the scientific study of education. The recklessness with which the man of letters, sometimes the college president, and now and then even the more canny college professor, will rush into the public discussion of matters of education con- cerning which he has no knowledge whatever, 94 IS THERE A NEW EDUCATION? and to which he has never given a half hour's connected thought, is appalling. Opin- ion serves for information, and prejudice usurps the place of principle. The popular journals and the printed proceedings of educa- tional associations teem with perfectly prepos- terous contributions bearing the signatures of worthy and distinguished men, who would not dream of writing dogmatically upon a physical, a biological, or a linguistic problem. For some recondite reason they face the equally difficult and unfamiliar problems of education without a tremor. The effect is bad enough on the colleges and schools themselves, but it is far worse on the public generally, who are thus led off to the worship of false gods. Even in the largest American institutions, where most is at stake, the men who give any conscientious and prolonged study to education itself, as distinct from the department of knowledge in which their direct work lies, can be counted upon the fingers of one hand. As a conse- quence, many college faculties are no better qualified to decree courses of study and condi- tions of admission than they are to adopt a IS THEKE A NEW EDUCATION? 95 system of ventilation or of electric lighting. In time, doubtless, this will be recognized, and in the former case, as in the latter, the faculties will submit to be guided by specialists who do know. That will never come to pass, however, until school and college teachers see clearly that scholarship is one thing and knowledge of the educational process quite another ; that long service in a school or college is almost as compatible with ignorance of education, scientifically considered, as long residence in a dwelling is compatible with ignorance of ar- chitecture and carpentry. Dr. Johnson's acumen was equal to drawing a distinction between the new as the hitherto non-existent, the new as the comparatively re- cent, and the new as the hitherto unfamiliar. In each and all of these senses of the word, I am confident that there is a new education. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION An Address delivered before the National Educational Association at Buffalo, New York, July 7, 1896 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Philosophers, poets, and sometimes men of science, are fond of speculating on an answer to the question. Whither are we tending? But more personal matters and more immediate in- terests detain the attention of the vast majority of mankind. The mere question of absolute physical direction, to say nothing of the ten- dencies of institutions and ideals, lies far be- yond the range of vision of the average man. The passenger in a railway train moving west may walk leisurely eastward, within the limits of the train, and feel certain of his direction and speed. But the train travelling westward, forty miles an hour, is on the surface of a planet that revolves on its axis from west to east with a velocity of a thousand miles an hour. More than this, the earth is also plung- ing forward in space, in its orbit about the 99 100 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION sun, at the fearful rate of more thfin 1100 miles per minute ; while as a member of the solar system it drifts rapidly with its fellows toward a distant point in the constellation Hercules. Perhaps the whole sidereal system, the entire cosmos even, has yet other motions of its own. How hopeless, then, is it to at- tempt to trace the exact path, judged by an absolute standard, of a body moving on the earth's surface ! The very conception staggers us, and our imaginations fall back helpless. Nor is it otherwise with the directions and tendencies of things intellectual and institu- tional. The Laudator temporis acti is con- vinced that civilization is just now on a down- ward grade. The old order has changed and given place to a new ; and the new order seems to him to lack something of the robustness, the idealism, the valor, of the old. His an- tagonist, fresh from contemplating the abstract rights of man as depicted by modern political philosophers, sees hope and promise only in the future ; to such an observer the past is a record of folly, imperfection, and crime. The sane man may be forgiven if at times he fails DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 101 to listen with patience to either advocate. His sanity deserts him, however, if he attempts to take refuge in cynicism and pessimism. While we may not hope to grasp fully the significance of movements of which we ourselves are a part, we can nevertheless study them, trace their beginnings, and measure their present effects. Such an attitude, hopeful yet cautious, leads to the only point of view which is at once scientific and philosophical. However difficult it may be to estimate pres- ent tendencies with any precision or authority, there is a widespread instinctive feeling among thoughtful men, as Mr. Kidd has pointed out in the first pages of his Social Evolution, that a definite stage in the evolution of our civiliza- tion is drawing to a close and that we are face to face with a new era. The history of the nineteenth century lends color to the sugges- tion that the new era has already begun. The evidence for this is drawn from the records of material advance, of scientific progress, and of political development. /^ S • The material advances made since the pres- ent century opened are more numerous and 102 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION more striking than the sum total of those that all previous history records. We find it diffi- cult even to imagine the world of our grand- fathers, and almost impossible to appreciate or understand it. Without the factory, with- out the manifold products and applications of steam and electricity, without even the news- paper and the sulphur match, the details of our daily life would be strangely different. In our time wholly new mechanical and eco- nomic forces are actively at work, and have already changed the appearance of the earth's surface. What another hundred years may bring forth no one dares to predict. / ^ ^ The scientific progress of the century is no less marvellous and no less revolutionary in its effects than the material advance. The neb- ular hypothesis, once the speculative dream of a few mathematicians and philosophers, is now a scientific commonplace. The geology gf Lyell, the astronomy of Herschel, the biol- ogy of von Baer, of Darwin, and of Huxley, the physiology of Mliller, the physics of Helm- holtz and of Roentgen, are already part of the common knowledge of all educated men. To DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 103 US the world and its constitution present an appearance very different from that which was familiar to our ancestors. But most striking and impressive of all move- ments of the century is the political develop- ment toward the form of government known as democracy. Steadily and doggedly through- out the ten decades the movement toward de- mocracy has gone its conquering way. When the century opened democracy was a chimera. It had been attempted in Greece and Rome and again in the Middle Ages ; and the reflect- ing portion of mankind believed it to be a failure. Whatever its possibilities in a small and homogeneous community, it was felt to be wholly inapplicable to large states. The contention that government could be carried on by what Mill called collective mediocrity '^ rather than by the intelligent few, was felt to be preposterous. The horrible spectre of the French Revolution was fresh in the minds of men. The United States, hardly risen from their cradle, were regarded by the statesmen of Europe with a curiosity, partly amused, partly disdainful. Germany was gov- 104 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION erned by an absolute monarch, the grand- nephew of the great Frederick himself. In England a constitutional oligarchy, with Pitt at its head, was firmly intrenched in power. The Napoleonic reaction was in full swing in France. How different will be the spectacle when the twentieth century opens ! In Great Britain one far-reaching reform after another has left standing only the shell of oligarchy; the spirit and support of British civilization are democratic. Despite the influence of Bis- marck and the two Williams, great progress is being made toward the democratization of Germany. France, after a period of unex- ampled trouble and unrest, has founded a suc- cessful and apparently stable republic. The United States have disappointed every foe and falsified the predictions of every hostile critic. The governmental framework constructed by the fathers for less than four millions of people, scattered along a narrow strip of seaboard, has expanded easily to meet the needs of a diverse population twenty times as large, gathered into great cities and distributed over an empire of seacoast, mountain, plain, and forest. It has DEMOCEACY AND EDUCATION 105 withstood the shock of the greatest civil war of all time, fought by men of high intelligence and determined convictions. It has permitted the development and expansion of a civili- zation in which there is equality of oppor- tunity for all, and where the highest civil and military honors have been thrust upon the children of the plain people by their grateful fellow-citizens. So significant has this phenomenon of de- mocracy become, so widespread is its influence, and so dominating are its ideals, that we have rightly begun to study it both with the im- partial eye of the historian and by the ana- lytic method of the scientist. The literature of democracy for the past half century is ex- tremely important ; and Tocqueville, Bage- hot, Scherer, Carlyle, Maine, Bryce, and Lecky are but a few of the great names that have , contributed to it. Through all the pages of \ i these writers runs an expression of the con- ^- I viction that the stream of tendency toward I democracy can neither be turned back nor I permanently checked. Some of these students \ of democracy are its enthusiastic advocates, , 106 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION others are its hostile critics : all alike seem to resign themselves to it. The process of substituting this new social and political system for an older one has not been uninterrupted or untroubled, nor has it given perfect satisfaction. As the political pendulum has continued to swing through a wide but diminishing arc, the cries have been loud and constant that injustice and favoritism have not been suppressed, that all are not equally prosperous, and that not even democracy is a cure for all our distress and dissatisfaction. Much of this is no doubt due to the tendency in all stages of history, spoken of by Burke, to ascribe to prevailing forms of government ills that in reality flow from the constitution of human nature. But in part at least — in how great part perhaps we fail to recognize — it is due to the imperfect and halting application of our democratic ideals and the very partial acceptance of our dem- ocratic responsibilities. The platitudes of democracy are readily accepted by the crowd ; the full depth of its principles is far from being generally understood. It is easy to cry " Lib- DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 107 erty, Equality, and Fraternity," and to carve the words in letters of stone upon public buildings and public monuments. It is not so easy to answer the query whether, in truth, unrestricted liberty and perfect equality are at all compatible. For it has been pointed out that liberty leads directly to inequality, based upon the natural differences of capacity and application among men. Equality, on the other hand, in any economic sense, is at- tainable only by the suppression in some degree of liberty, in order that, directly or in- directly, the strong arm of the state may be able to hold back the precocious and to push forward the sluggish. Obviously there is food for thought in this, — thought that may serve to check the rhetorical exuberance of the en- thusiast, and lead him to ask whether we yet fully grasp what democracy means. Democracy is, as I have said, a movement so novel and so sweeping, that we have not yet had time to compare it closely, in all its phases, with monarchy and oligarchy. The advantages of those forms of political organization were manifest when society was 108 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION young and man's institutional life yet undevel- oped. As time went on, the weaknesses of such forms of government became apparent. The plunge into democracy was made, and we have usually gone no further than to contrast its blessings with what we know of the op- pression and iniquity that resulted from king- ship and oligarchy in the early modern period. We must, however, go further than this, and gain a truer and deeper insight into the insti- tutional life of which we are a part. i It is just here that we find evidence of the I close relations that exist between democracy and education. So long as the direction of man's institutional life was in the hands of one or the few, the need for a wide di:ffusion of political intelligence was not strongly felt. The divine right of kings found its correlative in the diabolical ignorance of the masses. There was no educational ideal, resting upon a social and political necessity, that was broad enough to include the whole people. But the rapid widening of the basis of sovereignty has changed all that. No deeper conviction per- vades the people of the United States and of DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 109 France, who are the most aggressive exponents of democracy, than that the preservation of liberty under the law, and of the institutions that are our precious possession and proucj heritage, depends upon the intelligence of the whole people. It is on this unshakable foun- dation that the argument for public education at public expense really rests. It was not by accident that the Greek philos- ophers made their contributions to educational theory in treatises on the nature and functions of the state. Both Plato and Aristotle had a deep insight into the meaning of man's social and institutional life. To live together with one's fellows in a community involves fitness so to live. This fitness, in turn, implies disci- pline, instruction, training ; that is, education. The highest type of individual life is found in community life. Ethics passes into or includes politics, and the education of the individual is education for the state. The educated Greek at the height of his country's development was taught to regard participation in the public service alike as a duty and a privilege. The well-being of the community was constantly 110 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION before him as an ideal of personal conduct. To depart from that point of view is to entail the gravest consequences. That a large pro- portion of our people, and among their number some of the most highly trained, have departed from it, needs no proof. Failure to understand the political life of a democratic state and failure to participate fully in it, lead directly to false views of the state and its relations to the individual citizen. In- stead of being regarded as the sum total of the citizens who compose it, the state is, in thought at least, then regarded as an artificial creation, the plaything of so-called politicians and wire-pullers. This view, that the individual and the state are somehow independent each of the other, is not without support in modern political philosophy, but it is a crude and superficial view. It gives rise to those fal- lacies that regard the state either as a tyrant to be resisted or as a benefactor to be courted. No democracy can endure permanently on , Jeither basis. The state is the completion of ] |the life of the individual, and without it he Would not wholly live. To inculcate that doc- DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 111 trine should be an aim of all education in a democracy. To live up to it should be the ideal of the nation's educated men. Impossible in theory as the separation of the state from the individuals who compose it seems, yet in practice it is found to exist. This is true in the United States, and in some localities more than others. Our constitutional system, elaborately adjusted so that each in- dividual's choice may count in the ascertain- ment of the common will, now shelters a system of party organization and of political practice, undreamt of by the fathers, that effectually reduces our theoretical democracy to an oligarchy, and that oligarchy by no means an aristocracy. With here and there an exception, the educated men of the country hold themselves aloof — or are held aloof — from participation in what is called practical politics. That field of activity which should attract the highest intelligence of the nation too often repels it. When a man of the most highly trained powers engages in political life, he becomes an object of curiosity and comment. If he despises the petty arts and chicaneries 112 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION of the demagogue he becomes "unpopular." After a brief interval he passes off the public stage without even a perfunctory recognition of his services. It is safe to say that the framers of no government, least of all the framers of our own, contemplated a practical outcome such as this. If education and train- ing unfit men for political life, then there is something wrong either with our political life or with our education. The teachers of the country should address themselves to this question with determination and zeal. Instruction in civil government is good ; the inculcation of patriotism is good ; the flag upon the schoolhouse is good. But all these devices lie upon the surface. The real question involved is ethical. It reaches deep down to the very foundations of morality. It is illuminated by history. The public education of a great democratic people has other aims to fulfil than the exten- sion of scientific knowledge or the development of literary culture. It must prepare for intel- ligent citizenship. More than a century ago Burke wrote that " the generality of people are DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 113 fifty years, at least, behindhand in their poli- tics. There are but very few who are capable of comparing and digesting what passes before their eyes at different times and occasions, so as to form the whole into a distinct system." This is the warning of one of the greatest of publicists that a thoroughly instructed and competent public opinion on political matters is difficult to attain. Yet, unless we are to surrender the very principle on which democ- racy rests, we must struggle to attain it. Something may be accomplished by precept, something by direct instruction, much by example. The words " politics " and " politi- cian" must be rescued from the low esteem into which they have fallen, and restored to their ancient and honorable meaning. It is safe to say that the framers of our Constitu- tion never foresaw that the time would come when thousands of intelligent men and women would regard " politics " as beneath them, and when a cynical unwillingness to participate in the choice of persons and policies would develop among the people. Yet such is, of course, the case. The people of the state of 114 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION New York will in November next choose a governor. The power and dignity of the office make it one of the greatest in the land. About one and a half million qualified voters will be entitled to participate in the choice. Theoretically any competent person might be put forward for the office, and every indi- vidual's preference would be recorded and weighed. As a matter of fact, however, the choice of the state must be made between two persons, who in turn will be selected by, per- haps, ten per cent, of the electorate, at the sug- gestion or dictation of not more than a dozen men. Had such a system, or anything like it, been proposed at the time the Constitution was adopted, there would have been instant rebel- lion. " Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- ness" would not have seemed worth having under such conditions. Yet, now that it has come about, there is no very great dissatisfac- tion with it. The system could be broken up in a twelvemonth if men really cared to break it up. It exists, therefore, by popular consent, if not with popular approval. Its objective re- sults may be as good as those that would be DEMOCEACY AND EDUCATION 115 reached by the ideal system ; but its effect on the individual is disastrous. It induces a feel- ing of irresponsibility for public policy and a lack of interest in it that are absolutely de- structive of good citizenship. The good citi- zen is not the querulous critic of public men and public affairs, however intelligent he may be ; he is rather the constant participator in political struggles, who has well-grounded con- victions and a strong determination to influ- ence, by all honorable means, the opinion of the community. Were it otherwise, universal suffrage would not be worth having, and public education would be a luxury, not a necessity. We do not better ourselves or serve the pub- lic interest by berating those who do interest themselves continually in politics, when their aims and their methods are not to our liking. There can be no doubt that the patriotic and well-intentioned element in the community is stronger and more numerous than the self- seeking and evil-dispositioned. It has the remedy in its own hands, and it is one of the chief duties of our education to enforce this truth. 116 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Much of the disinclination to engage in active political life that is noticeable among a portion of our people is due, I believe, to the evil effects upon political standards and methods that flow from the debasing and degrading system that has gained so strong a hold in the United States of treating public office as a reward for partisan activity. The spoils system is absolutely undemocratic and utterly unworthy of toleration by an intelli- gent people. Suppose that it ruled the schools, as it rules so many other departments of public administration : then we should expect to see the election of a mayor in Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, or San Francisco, followed by hundreds of changes among the public school teachers, made solely for political reasons. How long would the National Educational Association permit that to go on without a protest that would be heard and heeded from Maine to Texas ? Yet why should teachers, as good citizens, be more tolerant of such an abuse in other departments of the government ? We have all noted with gratification the progress that is making toward the elimination of this DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 117 evil. A determined band of men have kept the issue before the public for nearly a genera- tion, and now they have the satisfaction of see- ing a great portion of the national service wrested from the defiling hand of the spoils hunter. In the state of New York the people have put into their new constitution an em- phatic declaration on the subject. The full effect of this declaration, splendidly upheld and broadly interpreted by the courts, is just beginning to dawn upon the foes of a reformed and efficient public service. From this ad- vance of sound sentiment and honest policy we may take every encouragement. But much remains to be done. Public sentiment must be first interested, then educated. Efficient pub- lic service is a mark of civilization. To turn over the care of great public undertakings to the self-seeking camp-followers of some politi- cal potentate, is barbaric. We teachers are the first to insist that incompetent and untrained persons shall not be allowed in the service of the schools. Why, then, should we tolerate, the sight of a house-painter, instead of an engineer, supervising the streets and roadways 118 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION of a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, or that of an illiterate hanger-on presiding over the public works of a great metropolis ? These instances, drawn at random from recent political history, are typical of conditions that will be found widely diffused throughout our public service. Those conditions exist because of bad citizenship, low ideals of public service, and wretchedly inadequate moral vision. They will not be remedied until each one of us assumes his share of the task. It is instructive, too, to note that the spoils system has diverted public interest in great measure from choice between policies to a choice between men. Two hundred years ago men made great sacrifices for an oppor- tunity to share in the making of the laws by which they were governed. Yet when, in 1894, the people of the state of New York were called upon to vote, at one and the same election, for a governor and for or against a new constitution, containing many important and some novel propositions, more than a million and a quarter men voted for a candidate for governor, while less than DEMOCEACY AND EDUCATION 119 three-quarters of a million expressed them- selves regarding the proposed constitution. And this is by no means a solitary instance of the tendency that it illustrates. A rational and intelligent democracy will first discuss questions of principle and then select agents to carry their determinations into effect. To fix our interest solely on individuals, and to overlook or neglect the principles for which they stand, is not intelligent. It is a serious error, too, to believe, and to spread the belief, that democracies have nothing to learn as to principles of govern- ment and nothing to improve. From the time of Aristotle the dangers that are in- herent in democracy have been known and discussed. But in our time men are often too blinded by the brilliancy of the mani- fest successes and advantages of this form of government to be able or willing to con- sider carefully the other side of the picture. How long, for example, could the American Congress maintain its power and prestige, if its membership was split up into half a score of warring groups, as in France? How 120 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION long will the American Senate continue to call forth, the respect and confidence of the people, if its childish methods of transacting public business and its inability to close its own debates are allowed to continue? How long would life in our greatest city be en- durable, if its administration be turned over permanently to the ignorant and rapacious members of a society organized for political plunder ? What more distressing division of our people can there be than one on sec- tional lines, such as took place in 1860 and such as is being attempted again in 1896? Is it possible to believe that our native op- timism is all that is needed to extricate us from these dangers — dangers not imaginary, but terribly real ? The difficulties of democracy are the op- portunities of education. If our education be sound, if it lay due emphasis on indi- vidual responsibility for social and political progress, if it counteract the anarchistic ten- dencies that grow out of selfishness and greed, if it promote a patriotism that reaches farther than militant jingoism and gunboats, DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 121 then we may cease to have any doubts as to the perpetuity and integrity of our institu- tions. But I am profoundly convinced that the greatest educational need of our time, in higher and lower schools alike, is a fuller appreciation on the part of the teachers of what human institutions really mean and what tremendous moral issues and principles they involve. The ethics of individual life must be traced to its roots in the ethics of the social whole. The family, property, the common law, the state, and the church, are all involved. These, and their products, taken together, constitute civilization and mark it off from barbarism. Inheritor of a glorious past, each generation is a trustee for posterity. To preserve, protect, and transmit its inheritance unimpaired, is its highest duty. To accomplish this is not the task of the few, but the duty of all. That democracy alone will be triumphant which has both intelligence and character. To develop them among the whole people is the task of education in a democracy. Not, then, by vainglorious boasting, not by 122 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION self-satisfied indifference, not by selfish and indolent withdrawal from participation in the interests and government of the commu- nity, but rather by the enthusiasm, born of intense conviction, that finds the happiness of each in the good of all, will our educa- tional ideals be satisfied and our free gov- ernment be placed beyond the reach of the forces of dissolution and decay. THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY An Introduction to Paulsen's "German Universities, their character and historical development" (New York, 1895) THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY Nowhere, outside of the German-speaking countries themselves, have the German uni- versities been so highly appreciated and so widely imitated as in the United States. Just as the historic American college traces its ori- gin in direct line to Oxford and Cambridge and their influence, so the new American uni- versity represents, to a remarkable degree, the influence and authority of the academic tradi- tions of Heidelberg and Gottingen, of Leipsic and Berlin. The distinction between the function of the college and that of the university, which be- comes clearer day by day to the student of education, has thus far proved too subtle to reach the understanding and too commonplace to satisfy the pride of the American people; for the existing terminology inextricably con- 125 126 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY fuses colleges and universities, and sometimes even institutions that are little more than sec- ondary schools, and it taxes the patience and skill of the expert to disentangle them. If we cut the Gordian knot by allowing every institution founded for any form or phase of higher education to classify itself by the name that it assumes, then there are no fewer than 134 universities in the United States.^ Of these, 1 are in Illinois (although the new Uni- versity of Chicago was not included in the enumeration of 1890-91), 8 are in Kansas, 14 are in Ohio, 9 are in Tennessee (of which total the city of Nashville alone, with about 80,000 inhabitants, contributes 3), 8 are in Texas, and 4 are in the city of New Orleans. When this surprising number is compared with the total of 20 universities for the whole German Em- pire, it is evident, without further investiga- tion, that there is some difference in standard between the two countries, and that to be a university in fact is something more than to be a university in name. 1 Beport of the Commissioner of Education, 1890-91, pp. 1398-1413. COLLEGE AND UNIVEKSITY 127 According to another extreme view, there are no American universities whatever. Only two years ago so distinguished an authority as Professor von Hoist, formerly of Freiburg but now attached to the University of Chicago, said : ^ — " There is in the United States as yet not a single university in the sense attached to the word by Europeans. All the American insti- tutions bearing this name are either compounds of college and university — the university, as an aftergrowth, figuring still to some extent as a kind of annex or excrescence of the col- lege — or hybrids of college and university, or, finally, a torso of a university. An insti- tution wholly detached from the school work done by colleges, and containing all the four faculties organically connected to a Universitas literarum, does not exist." Inasmuch as there is no common agreement among Europeans as to what the term "uni- versity" means — as may readily be seen by contrasting the University of Oxford with the University of France, and either or both with 1 Educational Beview, V, 113. 128 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY the University of Berlin — Professor von Hoist obviously meant by European, German; and his definition of a university bears out this interpretation. With this limitation his judg- ment may be accepted as technically correct ; but it rests upon two false assumptions : (1) that exact reproductions of the German universities should be developed in the United States, and that until this development takes place there will be no American universities; and (2) that the American college is to be classed with the German gymnasium as a sec- ondary school. Into these two blunders those observers of American educational organization who occupy the exclusively German point of view habitually fall ; and in more than one instance the truest and most natural develop- ment of higher education in America has been impeded and retarded by the attempt, on the part of those who share Professor von Hoist's errors, to force that development into the ex- act channels worn by German precedent. The American university may, or rather must, learn the lessons that its German prede- cessor has to teach, but it should be expected COLLEGE AND UNIVEESITY 129 to develop also characteristics peculiar to it- self. In order to become great — indeed, in order to exist at all, — a university must rep- resent the national life and minister to it. When the universities of any country cease to be in close touch with the social life and institutions of the people, and fail to yield to the efforts of those who would readjust them, their days of influence are numbered. The same is true of any system of educational organization. For this reason alone, if for no other, an educational organization closely following the German type would not thrive in America; indeed, with all its undisputed excellences, the German system would not meet our needs so well as the yet unsyste- matic, but remarkably effective, organization that circumstances have brought into exis- tence. Therefore Professor von Hoist is not likely at any time to see a single university in the United States, if he persists in giving to that word its technical German significance. But using the word in a broader, and, I be- lieve, a truer sense, — the sense that, while not confounding it with a college, however 130 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY large or however ancient, nor applying it mistakenly to a college and a surrounding group of technical and professional faculties or schools, yet extends the term to include any institution where students, adequately trained hy previous study of the liberal arts and sciences^ are led into special fields of learning and research by teachers of high ex- cellence and originality; and where, by the agency of libraries, museums, laboratories, and publications, knowledge is conserved, advanced, and disseminated, — in this sense one may per- haps count six or eight American universities in existence to-day, and half as many more in the process of making. To confuse the American college with the German gymnasium is inexcusable. Neither a large college like Princeton, nor a smaller one like Williams or Bowdoin, can be imag- ined as part of the gymnasial system. The American college is, in the phrase of Tacitus, tantum sui similis ; neither the English pub- lic school, the French lycee, nor the German gymnasium, is its counterpart. Its free stu- dent-life and broad range of studies liken it COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 131 in some degree to a university ; but the imma- turity of its students, the necessarily didactic character of most of the work of its instruc- tors, and the end that it has in view, mark it off as belonging to a different type. The college has proved to be well suited to the demands of American life and to be a power- ful force in American civilization and culture. Its usefulness is in no wise impaired nor its dignity lessened now that the university, with a wholly different aim and a totally different set of problems to solve, has grown up by its side. As President Hyde, of Bowdoin Col- lege, has truly and forcibly said : ^ " For com- bining sound scholarship with solid character ; for making men both intellectually and spirit- ually free ; for uniting the pursuit of truth with reverence for duty, the small college [and the large as well], open to the worthy graduates of every good high school, present- ing a course sufficiently rigid to give sym- metrical development and sufficiently elastic to encourage individuality along congenial lines, taught by professors who are men first and 1 Educational Beview, II, 320, 321. 132 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY scholars afterwards, governed by kindly per- sonal influence and secluded from too fre- quent contact with social distractions, has a mission which no change of educational con- ditions can take away, and a policy which no sentiment of vanity or jealousy should be permitted to turn aside." In 1891 there was one student enrolled in a college of the liberal arts and sciences for every 1363 inhabitants of the United States.^ Counting five persons to a family ,2 this means that one family in every 272.6, the country over, contributed to the college population. Of course, in some sections of the country the ratio was much less. In Massachusetts, for example, there was one college student for every 858 of population, or one for every 171.6 families. In Iowa the proportion was one to 908 persons, or 181.6 families ; in Utah, one to 789 persons, or 157.8 families. These statistics, read in relation to the vast 1 Beport of the Commissioner of Education, 1890-91, p. 827. 2 The actual ratio in the United States in 1890 was 4.93 (see Abstract of the Eleventh Census, 1890, p. 54). COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 133 extent of the territory of the United States and to the heterogeneousness of its popula- tion of 70,000,000, are ample proof, if proof were needed, that the college is a very famil- iar feature in American life, and that it sup- plies the educational needs of the people to a remarkable degree. Of the 481 American colleges, perhaps no two have precisely the same course of study or the same equipment ; but the common features that distinguish them are well known. The ancient classics, mathematics, the English language and literature, the modern European languages, the natural sciences, economics and philosophy, are doubtless represented to some extent in every college curriculum ; yet every phase of educational opinion and every variety of local interest are represented in the details of their arrangement. But we may be sure that wherever it is found, whether on the Atlantic seaboard, in some inland town of the West or South, or on the Pacific slope, the college is a force making for a broader intellectual life and a higher type of citizen- ship. It leaves to the university the task of 134 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY educating specialists, investigators, and sci- entifically trained members of the learned professions. The diversity of the college when contrasted with the uniformity of the gymnasium makes it plain that the American university does not rest upon any uniform and closely con- trolled foundation. American students come to the university with very varied prepara- tion in knowledge and training. But if the healthy forces recently set at work in the field of American higher education bring about their legitimate results, the efficiency of the university and its power for good will be distinctly increased rather than dimin- ished by the fact that its students are not all cast in a common mould. The principles of the limited election of studies and of the adaptation of the curriculum to the pupil, rather than the pupil to the curriculum, are as sound when applied in the secondary school as in the college, and the scope of their appli- cation widens year by year. The American college graduate who desires a university career is thus enabled to enter upon it a COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 135 broadly and liberally educated man, with tastes formed and aptitudes developed, ready to undertake with immediate advantage the specialized work for the sake of which the university exists. He is much more widely, though perhaps less minutely, trained, than the German Ahiturient. In one very important respect the American system of higher education is distinctly supe- rior to the German. In Germany a clear-cut dividing line between the gymnasium and the university is drawn by the complete and care- fully preserved difference in method, in spirit, and in ideal that exists between them. The contrast between the narrowness of the gym- nasium and the generous freedom of the univer- sity is very sharp, and many a university student loses his balance entirely, or wastes much pre- cious time and force, in adjusting himself to his totally new surroundings. In America, on the contrary, the college and the university some- times exist side by side in the same corpora- tion, as at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Chicago, and the work of the one passes gradually and insensibly into that of the other. 136 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY Even when, as is generally the case, the col- lege exists as a thing apart, the later years of its course of study are so organized and con- ducted as to make the transition from college to university easy and natural. This practice is sound in psychology, sound in economics, and sound in common sense. Its practical suc- cess is amply demonstrated by the fact that there is no American university — unless that name be given to the few partially developed departments of study represented at Worcester, Mass., — that is not in the closest relation to a college which is a member of the same corpora- tion. The institutions that to Professor von Hoist are "compounds of college and univer- sity " are, therefore, not, as he evidently thinks, compounds of gymnasium and university, but the peculiar product of the American educa- tional organization and its peculiar strength. But though the foundation on which uni- versity work in America rests, differs and will continue to differ from that provided in Ger- many by a uniform system of state-controlled gymnasiums, the university itself is essentially the same ; indeed, its organization has been COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 137 effected largely by men who had studied in the German universities, and who desired to develop in the United States a similar vehicle for the highest form of the scientific activity of the nation. The three fundamental princi- ples that the German universities have estab- lished and brilliantly illustrated, Lehrfreiheit, Lernfreiheit, and the pursuit of science for its own sake, are fully recognized in the American universities ; although it cannot be said that the third principle is as fully lived up to as it ought to be. Professor Paulsen has himself pointed out in his latest publication on the subject 1 that the peculiar character of the Ger- man university lies in the fact that it closely connects research and teaching. At present complaint is made that the one aim, research, is too largely pursued at the expense of the other, with the undoubted result, as a German university professor admits,^ that, considered merely as teaching institutions, the American universities surpass the German in efficiency. 1 Deutsche Bundschaii, September, 1894. 2 Professor Hugo Miinsterberg, quoted in Edticational Beview, VII, 204. 138 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY The emphasis often laid on teaching, at the expense of research, in the American universi- ties is largely due to the fact that the older generation of American university professors are men who were for many years engaged in the work of purely collegiate teaching, and they have neither outgrown nor cast off the habits and methods of years, nor combined re- search with teaching in any marked degree. This, of course, is quite as much to be depre- cated as an exaggeration of the opposite ten- dency. The younger generation of university teachers, however, a large proportion of whom have been trained in Germany, combine re- search with teaching in almost every instance ; though, happily, research is not yet reduced to work with " the lens, electrode, test-tube, and psychometer," which apparently seems to Dr. G. Stanley Hall to cover the field of possi- ble investigation. 1 It is possible, of course, in the enthusiastic devotion to research to over- look entirely or to minimize the need of good teaching in universities, and also to exaggerate 1 See " Research the vital spirit of teaching," The Forum, August, 1894. COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 139 the influence of research in producing good teachers ; but from present indications, this is not a source of immediate danger in the United States. Our wisest university teachers are in agreement with Virchow, who said recently^ that the aim of university study is " general scientific and moral culture together with the mastery of one special department of study." The main obstacle to the full establishment in America of the pursuit of science for its own sake, as a controlling university principle, is the development and rapid growth of technical schools, with low standards of entrance, in con- nection with universities, and their admission to a full and even controlling share in univer- sity legislation and administration. Indeed, in this lies the chief danger to the integrity of American university development. Thus far the Johns Hopkins University has escaped these influences entirely, and Harvard Univer- sity has been able to hold them in check. But at some other institutions they are strong and menacing. The danger consists in allowing the claim that closely specialized work in a 1 Lernen und Forschen (Berlin, 1892), p. 8. 140 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY purely technical or professional branch, entered upon without any broad preparatory training whatever, is to be regarded as legitimate uni- versity work and entitled to the time-honored university recognition and rewards. It need hardly be pointed out to the intelligent reader that the tendency to do this is under full head- way in the United States, and that its essential narrowness and philistinism increase with its success in establishing itself. The general public attribute unmerited scientific impor- tance to technical schools established in con- nection with colleges and universities because of their large enrollment ; and governing boards look upon them with favor both because of the influence they exert through their graduates and because they are often important sources of revenue. Both facts tend to divert atten- tion and funds from the pursuit of science as an end in itself, and to keep that principle from controlling university policy as it should. The difficulty would be diminished, and per- haps removed, if these technical schools (law, medicine, technology, and the like) were put upon a true university basis by insisting upon COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 141 a liberal education as a prerequisite for admis- sion to them. This would bring about a con- dition analogous to that which prevails in Germany, and would raise the American uni- versities to a plane that they have never yet occupied. For, with the exception of the medical school at the Johns Hopkins Univer- sity and the law school at Harvard, there are no professional schools in America of univer- sity rank. The others, without exception, admit to their courses and degrees immature students who have had only a partial secondary school training, or often no training at all. When such a state of affairs exists within a university organization, it is apparent that the technical or professional schools are an injury rather than a legitimate source of pride and strength, no matter how many hundreds of students they may attract. Indeed, the larger they become the greater is their influence for evil, for their teaching is necessarily brought down to the level of the least-trained intelligences among the heterogeneous body of students, and in this way the standard of the whole university is lowered. 142 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY So far as this tendency exists in the case of schools of applied science, it must be confessed that its existence is largely due to the attitude of the partisans of the old-fashioned uniform college course. By refusing to mathematical and scientific studies an equal place by the side of Greek and Latin, they forced the schools of science to establish themselves — in many cases on the narrowest possible edu- cational basis — outside of the college and in competition with it ; when, with a broad and generous treatment of the problems involved, the scientific or technical course might have been grafted on the college in a way that would have been of inestimable value both to the technical school and to the college, and greatly to the advantage of the cause of lib- eral education. The time when this could have been accomplished easily is past; but it can yet be brought about if undertaken in the right spirit and with wisdom. It is seemingly impossible for universities generally to raise their schools of law and medicine to university rank in the face of public indifference as to the educational quali- COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 143 fications of lawyers and physicians. How long this indifference will continue unmoved, there are no means of determining. Here and there efforts are making to insist upon some portion, at least, of a secondary education as a qualification for admission to schools of law and medicine. But as a rule admission to the practice of those professions is open to any one, however ignorant, who will serve a short term of apprenticeship. This arrangement is sometimes defended on the ground that many men have in the past greatly distinguished themselves as lawyers or physicians, though without any liberal education whatever. This is true, but they were rare exceptions; and they become rarer each year as competition grows closer and more pressing. So far as law, at least, is concerned, one reason for the prevailing laxity may be found in the fact that this profession offers the easiest mode of entrance into politics ; and to engage in that field of activity is often a chief aim in the minds of many young men who have no desire for a liberal education. But whatever public opinion may rest satisfied with, it seems indis- 144 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY putable that universities owe it to themselves to put their stamp upon no graduates in law, medicine and technology who are not liberally educated men. When the technical and professional schools shall have been raised to true university rank, one series of problems will be solved ; but others will remain. It is as necessary in America as Paulsen describes it to be in Ger- many, to conserve the unity of the university about the historic faculty of philosophy as a centre. This faculty is at once the essence of a university and its true glory. Standing alone it may justify the title university, as the history of the Johns Hopkins University for twenty years amply demonstrates. But to make it subordinate or to keep it weak and unimportant, whether by subdivision or other means, is to sap the university's life-blood. The faculty of philosophy represents, when un- divided, the unity of knowledge and the true catholicity of scholarly investigation. Through it each department of study is kept in sympa- thy with its fellows, and each strengthens and supports the rest. When dissevered, its parts COLLEGE AND UNIVEKSITY 145 tend to become mere Fachschulen ; and the highest ideals of university life are sacrificed. No stronger evidence in support of this opin- ion can be cited than the emphatic statements on the subject made by du Bois-Reymond, the physiologist, and by Hofmann, the chemist, in their inaugural addresses on assuming the rectorship of the University of Berlin in 1869 and 1880, respectively. These are the words of du Bois-Reymond : " The philosophical fac- ulty forms the connecting link between the remaining faculties. . . . The reciprocal ac- tion of the different branches of human knowl- edge which takes place within the philosophical faculty, would naturally be lost with its divi- sion, but this mutual influence contributes very much to widen the vision of the individ- ual, and to preserve in him a right judgment of his position in relation to the whole. The two divisions of the faculty would finally ap- proach the character of special schools ; the ideal stamp of the whole would be destroyed."^ And eleven years later Hofmann defended the same position with equal vigor. 1 Ueher Universitdts-EinricMungen (Berlin, 1869), p. 15. 146 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY The faculty of philosophy, or of arts and sciences, must not only be preserved in its integrity, but its spirit must dominate the whole university. As has recently been offi- cially pointed out,^ " The safety of the uni- versity spirit demands that the university proper [the faculty of philosophy] be counted as one part, and the collected schools [tech- nical and professional] together as another rather than that each professional and technical faculty shall claim a coordinate right with the foundation faculty, which would thus be made, not a half, but a seventh (or possibly one-twentieth, as the schools multiplied) of the university which but for it could have no real existence." This is still another lesson that the administrators of American univer- sities have yet to learn. One other danger, common to all universities, whether German or American, lies in the ex- cessive specialization which is so often warmly recommended to university students. Its inev- itable result is loss of ability to see things in 1 See Beport of the Secretary of the University of the state of New York for 1893, p. 176. COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 147 their proper proportions, as well as loss of sympathy with learning as a whole. Perhaps the division of labor cannot be carried too far for the value of the product, but certainly it can be carried too far for the good of the laborer. " Denn nur der grosse Gegenstand vermag Den tiefen Grund der Menschheit aufzuregen, Im engen Kreis verengert sich der Sinn." Signs are not wanting that this narrowing of view and of sympathy is already taking place ; but the university has in the faculty of phi- losophy the means to correct it if it will. What science and practical life alike need is not narrow men, but broad men sharpened to a point. To train such is the highest func- tion of the American university ; and by its success in producing them must its efQciency be finally judged. THE FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL An Address delivered before the Schoolmasters' Association of New York and vicinity, March 8, 1890 THE FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL Matthew Arnold has reminded us that the secondary school is the most ancient of existing educational institutions. It ante- dates the university by several centuries; and by its side the primary or elementary school, springing as it does from needs and ideas that are comparatively modern, seems but a creature of yesterday. Moreover, the history of the sec- ondary school is unbroken and easily traceable. The monastery schools and the famous estab- lishments at St. Gall, Reichenau, and Fulda are the direct ancestors of our Etons and Rugbys, of our contemporary lycees, gymnasia, and academies. In the United States the educational organi- zation is so indefinite and unformed, and the educational terminology in common use so un- 151 152 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL systematic, that certain explanations are neces- sary before any discussion of the province and scope of the secondary school may be under- taken. The threefold division of instruction into primary or elementary, secondary, and su- perior, has been accepted by the Bureau of Education at Washington, and is in accord with the practice on the continent of Europe. By superior instruction is meant that given in institutions empowered by law to confer de- grees. This may be either general or special, and includes in this country the colleges and universities as well as the professional schools of law, medicine, theology, education, agricult- ure, pharmacy, engineering, and the like. The implication is, though unfortunately not always the fact, that these institutions for superior instruction have required of applicants for admission the possession of an approved sec- ondary education. By primary or elementary instruction is meant such as the state is justi- fied in requiring of all children for its own safety and perpetuity. In the present state of educational science this may safely be held to include a knowledge of reading and writing, FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 153 and some instruction in elementary arithmetic, geography, history, natural science, and manual training. This elementary education should begin not later than the sixth year of life and with the average child seven years may be devoted to it, although specially intelligent or studious children may be permitted, as in France, to complete the prescribed studies in less time. It would seem natural, then, that the field of secondary instruction should be that which lies between the elementary and the superior schools. But this is not quite true. There is and can be no sharp line of division between the various grades of instruction. They pass gradually, even insensibly, into each other. In order to prevent the pupil's development from being arrested and his capacity for education from being brought to an end, he must con- stantly be led on to new heights. For this reason certain studies, usually classed as be- longing to secondary education, such as algebra and a foreign language, are very appropriately taught in the upper grades of the elementary school. A beginning in the field of secondary 154 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL studies is therefore made before the limits of the elementary school are reached, and by the time that the pupil is twelve, eleven, or even ten years of age. This is actually the case with the French lycee and the Prussian gymnasium. At the upper end of the secondary school course a similar condition is found. There is no reason why many secondary schools, partic- ularly public high schools, over 60 per cent, of whose graduates do not go on to a higher edu- cational institution, should not give instruc- tion in subjects such as logic, political economy, and trigonometry, which are contained in every college course. Unless this policy is adopted, the vast majority of American boys and girls will be deprived of all opportunity to come in contact with these studies and others like them. In the past the secondary school in this country has been very often dwarfed in im- portance and deprived of its proper spontane- ity and individuality, because it has permitted itself to settle down to the routine task of preparing pupils for entrance examination to EUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 155 college, fixed and conducted by the college authorities. Whatever that entrance exami- nation demanded, and in some cases just a trifle more, has been taught ; whatever such examination did not call for, no matter how important or valuable it might be for a boy's education, has not been taught. The second- ary school has been too largely dominated by the college ; and in few cases has that domina- tion been other than unfortunate. As notable instances of the contrary effect may be men- tioned the stimulating influence of the more recent regulations regarding entrance examina- tions adopted by Harvard College, particularly in geometry and in physics, and the novel unity and thoroughness imparted to the in- struction in English in the secondary schools by the action of the colleges in uniting with the schools in deciding upon a uniform scheme of requirements for entrance in that subject. It is neither proper nor dignified for the secondary schools to continue in this con- dition of dependence upon college entrance examinations. They should be independent 156 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDAEY SCHOOL and self-centred. By a careful study of tlie history and principles of education, coupled with the teachings of their own large experi- ence, they should seek to devise that course of study and those methods of instruction that are best suited to the mental, moral, and physical development and culture of the boys and girls committed to their care. Nor need it be feared that in so doing they will in- terfere in any way with the preparation of their pupils for college work. For in educa- tion it is profoundly true that that which is intrinsically the best in any particular stage of development, is also the best preparation for that which comes after. If the American boy is to obtain his bacca- laureate degree at the age of twenty or twenty-one (which is considerably more than a year later than the French boys leave the lycee and the Prussian boys the gymnasium), he must be ready to enter college not later than seventeen ; and this can be managed while actually providing for the secondary school a more comprehensive curriculum than at present obtains. Before discussing in de- FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 157 tail the composition of such a curriculum, one or two preliminary considerations must be mentioned. They may, however, be dis- missed very briefly, since they have so re- cently been treated with the highest authority by President Eliot. ^ The first of these has to do with the length of the school day and that of the vacations. The former should never be less than five full hours of study and school discipline ; the tendency to shorten it any further is irrational and should be checked. A programme arranged on sound educational principles can occupy five hours a day easily enough without in any way im- pairing the pupil's health or lessening his interest, unless the teacher is peculiarly lack- ing in mental equipment and professional qualifications. The vacations are now unduly long, and seem to be yielding to a certain strong social pressure to make them even longer. The old-fashioned summer vacation of four or six weeks has long since become one of ten or twelve, and in our city schools 1 Can school programmes be shortened and enriched ? Atlantic Monthly, August, 1888, pp. 250-258. 158 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL a summer vacation of fifteen or even sixteen weeks is by no means a curiosity. It is the teacher who needs this vacation more than the pupil. But even from his standpoint the present practice has gone beyond reasonable bounds. The German method of giving three weeks at Easter, one at Pfingster, six in mid- summer, one at Michaelmas, and two at Christ- mas seems wiser than ours, for it makes a more frequent alternation between work and play. Perhaps sixteen weeks — including the recesses at Christmas and Easter and a long summer vacation, as better suited to our cli- mate and habits of life than the German plan — might be agreed upon as the maximum period in which school duties may wisely be suspended each year. But in addition to the school year of thirty- six weeks and twenty -five hours in each week, the secondary schools are sadly in need of better trained teachers. It is remarkable how entirely the teachers in these schools have re- mained uninfluenced by the great interest in the science and art of teaching which has of late years manifested itself both in this FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 159 country and in Europe. Secure in their pos- session of a considerable amount of knowledge and of more or less culture, the secondary school teachers have not seemed to under- stand the significance or the value of a pro- fessional preparation. As a result their work has been done in a routine, imitative way and their pupils have suffered. Most of the criti- cisms that may now be legitimately made upon the work of the secondary schools would be disarmed if the teachers in these schools were abreast of the present development of their art. One important reason why the sec- ondary schools have not felt this full measure of progress in methods of teaching that is so marked in the elementary schools, is that sec- ondary teachers are usually college graduates, and the colleges have, until very recently, done so little to show that they are aware of what is being accomplished in the study of education. Consequently they have failed to contribute their proper proportion of duly qualified teachers. Until the colleges assume their full responsibility in this matter and en- deavor to discharge it, the work of the sec- 160 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL ondary school, speaking broadly, will not be as well done as it might be. Assuming that more competent teachers are at hand and that a school year of thirty-six weeks of twenty-five hours each is agreed upon, what should be the aim of the instruc- tion in the secondary school and with what curriculum should it endeavor to accomplish it? It should be the aim of the secondary school, I take it, by instruction and discipline to lay the foundation for that cultivation and inspiration that mark the truly educated man. In endeavoring to attain this ideal, the second- ary school must not lose sight of the fact that it is educating boys who are to assume the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, and who must, in all probability, pursue a specific calling for the purpose of gaining a livelihood. The fact that the secondary school has also a selective function to perform is often overlooked. Yet this is most important. Secondary school pupils are adolescents, and their tastes and capacities are rapidly forming and finding expression. To afford opportunity for these to develop, and to encourage them to FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 161 develop along the best and most effective lines, is an obvious duty of the secondary school. Because they are not selective, many secondary courses of study are very ineffective. To prepare a course of study which shall keep all these points in mind, and at the same time afford the developing intellect of the pupil that exercise of which it is capable, is not an easy task. Indeed, it presents some problems which but a little while ago seemed almost impossible of solution. But patience, wider experience, and a careful study of the surrounding conditions have lessened the dif- ficulties. The chief of these is perhaps that created by the rapid development and present importance of scientific and technical schools. These institutions represent a real and signifi- cant movement in modern civilization. They have complicated the question of a curriculum for secondary schools by demanding a prepara- tion quite different from that required for en- trance to the average American college. That the problem thus raised belongs to the field of secondary education in general and is not due to conditions prevailing in any one country 162 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDAEY SCHOOL alone, is shown by the fact that England, Germany, and France have all been brought face to face with it as we have been. In each of these countries much progress towards its solution has been made. In England the so- called "modern side" has been added to the traditional classical course. In France the lycee has its cours special in which mathe- matics and the sciences replace Latin and Greek. In Germany the well-established real- gymnasium and real-schule are every year justifying their right to exist on an equal plane with the gymnasium itself. A specially inter- esting movement in this connection is one in Germany which has for some time past been calling for the establishment of an EinJieits- schule, in which the main features both of gymnasium and real-schule are to be combined. The course of study that I would suggest for the typical American secondary school is one in which nine elements are always represented : namely, the mother-tongue, ge- ography and history, natural science, mathe- matics, Latin, Greek, French and German, drawing and constructive work (manual train- FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 163 ing), and physical training. It combines some features of the English "modern side" with some of those of the French cours special^ and is not unlike what German students of education have in mind under the name of Ein- heitsschule . It involves beginning the study of one foreign language at ten or eleven years of age, and the elements of algebra and of plane geometry shortly afterward. Ample choice would be permitted to students, provided only that not more than five so-called ''book" subjects were carried on at once, that no two new languages were begun at the same time, and that English, geography and history, and natural science were always represented. Pupils of a different temperament, of different points of view, and with different purposes in life would be guided to express and to satisfy themselves to the fullest extent possible. The ability to read intelligently, to write legibly, and to perform understandingly and correctly with integers the four fundamental operations of arithmetic, must be insisted upon at ten years of age. The growing practice of postponing even 164 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL this modicum of knowledge until after the tenth year is to be emphatically discouraged. Attention has recently been called to the fact that one of the best-known academies in the United States requires for admission only some knowledge of common school arithmetic, writ- ing, spelling, and the elements of English grammar, and that the average age of pupils on entering is sixteen and one-half years. At this age the French boy is reading Cicero, Vir- gil, and Horace, Sophocles and Plato, Shakspere and Tennyson, as well as studying general his- tory, solid geometry, and chemistry. His Ger- man contemporary is similarly advanced. It is very evident that at this point there is a tremen- dous waste in our educational system. It must be remedied and remedied speedily, if our higher education is not to be discredited altogether. What I intend to include under each of the topics of study above enumerated may be briefly outlined. 1 English — The study of the mother tongue must not be neglected by any class of students. But it must be far better taught than now and with a different aim. That the instruction in FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 165 English, both in school and college, has been sadly neglected and little developed in the past, will not be denied. Perhaps no one but the col- lege professor who requires original written work from his pupils, knows how insufficient and in- efficient the English teaching in the secondary school is. A very large proportion of those students who reach the baccalaureate degree do not possess the ability to express with accuracy and conciseness, whether orally or in writing, even a simple train of thought. This woeful neglect of the mother tongue has been largely due, as Paulsen points out is the case in Germany, to the great preponderance of classi- cal instruction and the impression that this afforded all the linguistic training necessary. We have gradually emancipated ourselves from the tyranny of this notion ; and now the long- neglected study of the mother tongue is begin- ning to receive proper recognition in schools of every grade. Our ideals for this study are no longer satisfied by the plodding through a grammar and by the memorizing of a few rules and canons of rhetoric. Language study, and particularly that of a tongue so rich, so versa- 166 EUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL tile and so intrinsically interesting as our own, means far more than that. The general aim of this instruction in the secondary school should be to impart a know- ledge of the principal laws of structure and syn- tax, to develop ease, fluency, and correctness in speaking and writing, to point out the principal stages in the history of English literature, and to bring the pupil to an acquaintance with some of the great masterpieces of prose and verse. Wide but carefully chosen reading and frequent and systematic exercises in composition are the most efficient means of instruction. It should be remarked, however, that composition writing is valuable only if the pupil's work is care- fully and intelligently corrected and criticised. Otherwise it is a positive evil, for it serves to exaggerate and make habitual faults already present in the use of language. It is of the highest importance that the pupil should be accustomed to hear correct English spoken. Downright inaccuracy of speech should be con- sidered sufficient reason for a teacher's removal. A boy will learn more evil in a week from a bad example than he will derive good FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 167 from a book in a month. Most language in- struction should be oral and the pupil should from the very first take a large part in the ex- ercises. As language is but the form and ex- pression of thought, care should be taken to see that thought is always expressed by it. This cannot be the case if the pupil is forced ahead either too rapidly or in an unnatural course. The amount of time proposed for this branch of study is therefore comparatively large, and no class should be relieved of the necessity of writing dictations-exercises or compositions at least as often as once a week. When this is done and done properly in the secondary school, the college instruction in English may enter upon that which really belongs to it, and will no longer be compelled to devote itself, as now, almost wholly to what President Charles Kendall Adams once happily described as " the flagellation of bad English." Nor should it be forgotten that the secondary school must bear its share in teaching pupils how and what to read, in the best and deepest sense of that phrase. No English instruction is entirely successful unless it implants in every pupil 168 FUNCTION OF THE SECOND AEY SCHOOL a love of the masters of thought and style and a desire to grow more and more familiar with them. 2 G-eograpJiy and History — These comple- mentary studies, inseparable from each other and indispensable to a sound education, have also been sadly neglected in the secondary schools. We might truthfully say of the Americans, as Breal said a few years ago of his fellow Frenchmen, that they are celebrated for' their ignorance of geography. The subject has been so badly taught that it might almost as well have been passed over altogether. We are now beginning to follow the example set us by Germany in teaching geography, and perhaps in a few years it will be adequately presented in the schools. Geography has two distinct aims. It seeks to point out and de- scribe the character, the divisions, the climate, and the configuration of the surface of the globe that we inhabit, and also to trace the modifi- cations which man himself has made and the artificial divisions that he has marked off upon it. When dealing with the former questions geography is physical; when considering the FUNCTION OF THE SECOND AEY SCHOOL 169 latter it is political and commercial. It thus occupies a position between the natural and the historical sciences and connects the two. When geography is properly taught, the child is first led to observe his immediate surround- ings. The points of the compass, relative situa- tions and distances, the real significance of a map, may all be taught and best taught with reference to the city, town, or village in which the partic- ular school is situated. The schoolroom should be well supplied with globes, relief maps, charts, and other illustrative material, in order that, when the pupil passes from the considera- tion of his immediate surroundings to that of localities at a distance, his understanding may receive the assistance of these symbolic repre- sentations. When political and commercial geography is undertaken, its close relation with history makes it both advisable and necessary to teach both subjects together. Perhaps no study that is pursued at this age brings to the pupil a richer store of facts or a greater in- tellectual stimulus than do these. Historical teaching proper will of course begin with the narration of the lives of great men and the 170 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL story of their achievements. About this as a nucleus may be grouped a considerable body of facts and an account of the tendencies set in operation by leaders of thought and action. This mode of presentation familiarizes the pupil from the first with the human factor, the spiritual force, in history. The scope of the historical teaching in an American second- ary school should include an accurate know- ledge of the main facts in the history of the United States and of England, as well as a general acquaintance with the progress of uni- versal history. 3 Mathematics — Whether or not Sir Wil- liam Hamilton was justified in his unfavorable judgment as to the value of mathematical study, it seems clear that our schools have devoted too much time to the subject. Un- der the guise of mathematics much has been taught that is not mathematics at all. Ab- struse and very absurd problems and puzzles in logic are to be found in almost every mathe- matical text-book under the delusive head- ing of ''Examples." These simply vex and discourage the student and arouse in him a FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 171 distaste for what is really valuable and prac- tical in mathematical study. They should be passed over entirely, as should also many of the complexities of commercial arithmetic, and all but three or four of the tables of weights and measures. The metric system must be taught as a matter of course. The elements of plane geometry should precede algebra for every reason known to sound educational theory. It is more fundamental, it is more concrete, and it deals with things and their relations rather than with symbols. In the form of what the Germans call Raumlehre^ many geometrical facts would be taught from the first, in the proposed curriculum, under the head of drawing and constructive work. When the formal proofs of geometry are later entered upon, they will therefore be seen to be easy and natural, rather than difficult and wholly strange. Good teaching in mathe- matics should enable the student who follows a classical course during the last three years in the secondary school, to enter college with a good understanding of arithmetic, algebra and geometry, both plane and solid. The 1T2 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL student selecting a scientific course in the secondary school could add to this a know- ledge of analytic geometry, of trigonometry, and perhaps of determinants as well. 4 Natural Science — This is a term of wide and varying significance. As used here, it has two meanings. During the earlier years of the course, it is equivalent to the term NaturhescJireihung as used in German school- programmes. Applied to the later years, it means the experimental study of chemistry and physics. In the lower grades it is not specifically physics or chemistry or geology or botany or physiology or astronomy that is studied, but something of all these. The subject-matter is found in the facts of nature which surround the child on every hand, and which should be as familiar to him as the names he hears. This instruction aims to open the pupil's eyes, to teach him how and what to see, and to appreciate what the word nature means. It is the most fascinating of school studies ; and it complements and runs into almost every other subject. 5, 6 Latin and Grreek — In the secondary FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 173 schools of Europe, Latin still occupies the leading place. Greek is begun later than Latin, and when the Latin is well taught Greek needs less time and effort for the mastery of so much of it as is desirable during the period of secondary instruction. Inasmuch as both serve practically the same purpose in education, they may properly be spoken of under a single head. It seems quite safe to predict that no cult- ure will ever be considered broad and deep unless it rests upon an understanding and appreciation of the civilizations of Greece and Rome. Whether such culture is necessary or even desirable for the great body of the pop- ulation, and whether the classics are properly taught or not, are very different questions from that which is raised as to their educa- tional value. It is only as respects one or the other of the former that recent criticism and attack have been in any degree success- ful. The classics have suffered from being forced upon those who cared nothing for them and would care nothing. They have also suffered, and very severely, through the 174 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL waste of time they have involved. But both of these objections may be removed without weakening in any degree the position of the classics. To the charge of bad and wasteful methods of classical teaching, much of it done under the guise of thoroughness, the schools must plead guilty. They have been endeav- oring to make philologists out of the mate- rial afforded by the average schoolboy. The greatest value of the classics is found in the ability to read and understand the great poets, philosophers, and historians who wrote for all time in the Greek and Latin tongues. The boasted discipline of classical study for the attention and reasoning powers may be quite as well obtained from studies which touch more closely the practical life of the great mass of the population. This argument is, therefore, not only unsound, but needless for the classicist to use, since he has at his com- mand others that are stronger and more effec- tive. To know something of the spirit of Sophocles, Demosthenes, and Plato, of Cicero, Horace, and Tacitus, and to understand the civilizations and the points of view that they FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 175 represent, are, from one point of view, almost enough to give the fortunate one a claim to cult- ure. The wearisome grammatical drill and the tedious reiteration of details that are relatively of little value, save in so far as these are abso- lutely necessary to enable the pupil to read intelligently, are out of place in secondary edu- cation. The proper aim of classical instruction at this period is stated with great clearness and force in the comments on the course of study furnished by the Prussian Minister of Public Instruction to the teachers in the most suc- cessful secondary school yet devised, the gym- nasium. The Minister says : — " So far as the end to be attained by a know- ledge of language is concerned, it is hardly neces- sary to adduce arguments to justify the proposition that the acquisition of a vocabulary is of at least as much importance as familiarity with grammati- cal details. For it is just by means of this vocabu- lary that satisfaction is gained as facility in reading is acquired ; by means of it, too, interest in reading extends beyond the period of school life. The aim of the gymnasium is not, however, attained when the pupils are able merely to read works of a certain degree of difficulty. Emphasis is much rather to 176 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL be laid upon the fact that they have read works of a certain scope and character, and upon the manner in which they have read them. As regards the method of reading, two points must be kept in mind; it must be based upon verbal accuracy and it must lead to an appreciation of the thought which is expressed and the form chosen for its expression. On the former consideration rests the disciplinary value of the classics ; on the latter the basis of that which, when fully developed, is designated as classical culture. A treatment of this reading which neglects grammatical and lexical exactness, leads to superficiality; a treatment which makes the acquisition of grammatical and lexical exact- ness the main aim of reading, overlooks a funda- mental reason for the teaching of Latin in the gymnasium. Special attention must be called to this latter error, for it endangers both the interest of the students in the study of the ancient lan- guages and the reputation of the gymnasium among its most thoughtful supporters, by turning the teaching of the classics, even in the highest grades, into a mere repetition of grammatical rules and a memorizing of minute details as to synonyms and style." This applies to the United States quite as well as to Prussia, and to the study of Greek FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 177 as much as to that of Latin. When these directions are followed it will be easy enough to read considerably more of the classics than is now done in the secondary schools, and to do it in the time at the teacher's disposal. It may also be observed that the grammatical de- tails of different languages, when alike, should be studied once for all and not repeated for every new language taken up. Devices for carrying out this suggestion have been pre- pared under the form of parallel grammars and are now used in a few schools both in this country and in Great Britain. As a rule the classical teacher has not appre- ciated the changed educational conditions and the new demands made upon the schools. He has therefore provoked antagonism when he should have invited cooperation. He must recognize that while the secondary school can- not dispense with the classics, it can no longer be completely dominated by them. 7 French and German — These are indis- pensable in the secondary school. It was Goethe who said, " A man who knows only his own language does not know even that." 178 FUNCTION OF THE SECOND AEY SCHOOL One modern language should be begun early and studied continuously for several years. To some it may seem a matter of indifference whether French or German is first taken up. But French seems to offer to the English- speaking student more difficulties of pronun- ciation and of idiom than German, and should therefore be begun before the pupil has ac- quired very fixed notions of grammatical and rhetorical canons. Moreover, the relation be- tween French and Latin seems to furnish a good reason for making the two, to a certain extent, interdependent and illustrative, the one of the other. An ability to read French, to understand it when spoken, and in some meas- ure to write it and to speak it having been attained, the mastery of a certain amount of German will involve fewer difficulties, and the boy may enter college or the scientific school with a good reading knowledge, and perhaps something more, of both of these indispensable keys to culture ; or he may postpone the second modern language until the college period is entered upon. 8 Drawing and Constructive Work — To in- FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 179 trocluce this subject generally into the sec- ondary schools of this country would be a new departure. It is so, however, only be- cause these schools have not been doing their duty by the pupils entrusted to them. Taken together, drawing and constructive work con- stitute what is properly called manual training, the educational value of which has been estab- lished beyond all contravention both by argu- ment and by experiment. It aims to develop in the pupil powers of thought-expression that no other study reaches, as well as to train the judgment, to call out the executive powers, and to give self-confidence in dealing with actual material. It serves also to illustrate much of the instruction in mathematics and in natural science. Many secondary school pupils may wish to follow manual training beyond the mere rudiments and with more especial refer- ence to its scientific and technological applica- tions. It may be added, for the sake of definite- ness, that the constructive work will naturally employ for its material pasteboard, clay, soft wood, and metal, successively. 180 FUNCTION OE THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 9 Physical Training — For obvious reasons this important subject finds a place in every part of the course. More time is to be allotted to it in the earlier years because at that time the pupil is less accustomed to the confinement of the schoolroom and to the strain of continuous mental exertion. At this stage, too, important physical habits are formed, for instance those of breathing, walking, and sitting ; and when formed correctly they reduce somewhat the time necessary for systematic bodily training. Whenever possible this physical training might be given in the open air of a play- ground. Such an arrangement not only involves a change of surroundings and conse- quent rest for the pupil, but it means purer air in the lungs, purer blood in the veins, and an accompanying exhilaration that is in itself a powerful tonic, mental and physical. A valua- ble and indeed indispensable accessory of physical training is play, the free, unimpeded, wilful activity of the child. So great is its value that many are of opinion that it makes systematic physical training unnecessary. On this point I shall merely quote Dr. Hart well, FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 181 who seems to me to have correctly expressed the relation between play and systematic exercise in his admirable address before the Physical Training Conference held in Boston in November, 1889. Dr. Hartwell, in speak- ing of this matter, said : — "I have no disposition to disparage athletic sports. I would that they were more general and better regulated than they are in our country. I believe that they are valuable as a means of recrea- tion ; that they conduce to bodily grov/th and im- provement; and that their moral effects are of value, since they call for self-subordiuation, public spirit, and cooperative effort, and serve to reveal the dominant characteristics and tendencies, as regards the temper, disposition, and force of will of those who engage in them. But they bear so indelibly the marks of their childish origin, they are so crude and unspecialized as to their methods, as to render them inadequate for the purposes of a thorough-going and broad system of bodily educa- tion. It is well to promote them, and it is becom- ing increasingly necessary to regulate them ; but it is unsafe and short-sighted to consider them as constituting anything more than a single stage in the best bodily training." 182 FUNCTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL When play and physical training are thus carefully distinguished, each is seen to have an educational function of its own and neither will be substituted for the other. Both are necessary in education. It is believed that a course made up of these nine lines of study well distributed will meet all the intellectual wants of the boy from his eleventh to his eighteenth year, and will afford him a harmonious and complete training. Whether the pupil enters an institution of higher grade or not, he will have had an edu- cation substantially complete in itself. Yet for the studies of a higher institution he will have received an admirable preparation. The secondary school is in this way enabled to preserve its place in the general educational organization of the country without sacrificing its independence. No less a man than Darwin has recorded the fact that his school-days, so far as his education was concerned, were an utter blank. Not infrequently men of less reputation, but yet prominent in their respective callings, express a similar opinion. This in itself is FUNCTION OF THE SECOND AKY SCHOOL 183 a danger signal and must be heeded. The school may not with impunity remain long out of touch with the spirit which animates the intellectual leaders of an age or generation. Its task grows more difiicult as civilization grows more complex. "The most incessant occupation of the human intellect throughout life," said John Stuart Mill in his Inaugural Address as Rector of St. Andrews University, " is the ascertainment of truth." The standards of truth and the methods for its discovery must be revealed in and by the process of education) When this process has been carried so far as to entitle the resulting education to be called liberal, as Huxley for example has defined a liberal education, the youth is prepared to live not for himself alone, but for the society of which he forms a part and for the race of which he is a member. If the secondary school fails to obtain this larger view, its training will hardly contribute to an education which shall be, in the language of Rollin, " the source of certain peace and happiness both in the family and in the state." REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES From The Atlantic Monthly, March, 1894 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES It has come to be distinctly recognized that any far-reaching educational reform in the United States must begin with the secondary schools. The elementary school is helpless if the secondary school refuses to cooperate with it in raising the standard of scholarship and in improving the methods of instruction ; and but few colleges are strong enough to demand of the secondary schools more and better work than the latter are now doing. Persuasion on the part of the colleges has in some cases ac- complished a good deal, but the improvement has been limited either to one or two subjects of instruction, or to the schools of a relatively small territory. The secondary schools them- selves, not always conducted in a wise or gen- erous spirit, have too often sacrificed the necessities of sound training to the local de- 187 188 REFOKM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION mand for an ambitious programme containing twoscore or more school subjects, no one of which is pursued far enough or long enough for the pupil to derive from it the educational value it possesses. Or they have erred on the other side, and in their devotion to a past ideal have excluded from the curriculum important fields of knowledge that have grown up within a century. Thus the secondary school has ap- peared to many observers not only to scatter a pupil's energies and interests, but to delay him unduly. The consequence is, as President Eliot showed very clearly several years ago, that the American boy of fifteen or sixteen, no whit inferior to his French or German fellow in native ability, is from two to three years behind him in acquired knowledge. To remedy so apparent an evil as this would be an easy task in France or in Prussia. The minister of education would consult his official advisers, and call the leading educational ex- perts to his council ; in a few weeks an order would issue prescribing for the schools a new and reformed procedure. In this way Lehr- plane and Lehraufgaben for the higher schools REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 189 of Prussia were issued in 1882, and again in 1892. Similarly, in 1890 the existing Plan d'Etudes et Programmes of the secondary schools in France was promulgated. In this country, however, where no central educational administration exists, and where bureaucracy is not popular, educational reforms can be brought about only by persuasion and coopera- tion, for no official and no institution is em- powered to dictate to us. The press, the plat- form, the teachers' meeting, must be availed of to put forward new ideas ; and men and women in large numbers must be reasoned with and convinced in order to secure their acceptance. For secondary education, and through it for our educational organization generally, a long step has been taken in this direction by the proceedings that led up to the appointment, by the National Educational Association, of the Committee of Ten on secondary school studies, and by the exceedingly valuable re- port which that committee has now laid before the public.^ 1 Published for the National Educational Association, by the American Book Company (New York, 1894). 190 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION For thirty years the National Educational Association has been known as a large body of teachers that assembled annually to listen to addresses and discussions of more or less practical value. It has come to command an attendance of as many as sixteen thousand teachers, of all classes and from every section of the country. Its power and authority have increased with its size and its representative character. In 1892, the directors of this asso- ciation determined to pass from the field of mere discussion, and begin an educational in- vestigation, under their own auspices and paid for out of their own funds, that should result in some practical gain to the country at large. They accepted the suggestion, made to them after careful deliberation, that the problems connected with secondary education should be vigorously and systematically attacked, and appointed a committee, which has come to be known as the Committee of Ten, to take full charge of the task, at the same time appropri- ating twenty-five hundred dollars to pay the expenses of the work. The members of this committee were carefully selected with a view REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 191 to giving representation to the types of edu- cational organization most interested, and to the various sections of the country. ^ The committee was made up of one presi- dent of an Eastern university, two presidents of Western state universities and one of a Southern state university, one president of a college for women, one professor in a Western college open to both sexes, one head-master of an endowed academy, one principal of a public high school for both sexes, one principal of a public high school for girls only, and the Commissioner of Education, whose familiarity with the principles and practice of education in every part of the 1 The members of the committee -were : President Charles W. Eliot, of Harvard University, chairman; Dr. W. T. Harris, Commissioner of Education ; President James B, Angell, of the University of Michigan ; President James M. Taylor, of Vassar College ; Mr. John Tetlow, Principal of the Girls' High and Latin Schools, Boston, Mass. ; Mr. 0. D. Robinson, Principal of the Albany (N. Y. ) High School ; President James H. Baker, of the University of Colorado ; President Richard H. Jesse, of the University of Missouri ; Mr. James C. MacKenzie, Head-Master of the Lawrenceville (N. J.) School ; and Professor Henry C. King, of Oberlin College. 192 KEFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION United States gave representation indirectly both to the elementary school interests and to the special students of education. The procedure adopted by the Committee of Ten is fully described in the report to which it is the object of this paper to direct attention. It may be briefly stated thus : — After a study of the whole problem, it was decided to appoint nine conferences of ten members each, — one conference for each of the main divisions of work that fall properly to the secondary school. The members of the conferences were selected equally, as nearly as possible, from college and school instructors who had attained a reputation in connection with the subject of their conference, due re- gard being had also to the representation of various educational interests and the several sections of the country. Conferences were appointed, therefore, on Latin ; Greek ; Eng- lish ; other modern languages ; mathemat- ics ; physics, astronomy, and chemistry ; natural history (biology, including botany, zoology, and physiology) ; history, civil gov- ernment, and political economy; and geog- EEEOEM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 193 raphy (physical geography, geology, and meteorology). The several conferences as- sembled in December, 1892, at convenient points, and eighty-eight of the ninety members were in attendance. Of these eighty-eight, forty-six were in the service of colleges and universities, forty-one in the service of schools, and one was a government official formerly in the service of a university. So admirable are the lists of members of these conferences that it is difficult to speak of them without enthu- siasm. Among the ninety names will be found many that stand in the foremost rank of Amer- ican scholarship ; and no one of the ninety was without valuable educational experience of some kind. This fact of itself gives great weight to their recommendations; and their exhaustive reports, which are appended to the Report of the Committee of Ten, are a mine of educational information and suggestion of the utmost value. The nine conferences were in session for three days, and addressed themselves to the task of preparing answers to the searching questions submitted to them by the Committee 194 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION of Ten. These questions, eleven in number, were as follows : — " (1) In the school course of study, ex- tending approximately from the age of six years to eighteen years, — a course including the periods of both elementary and secondary instruction, — at what age should the study which is the subject of the Conference be first introduced ? " (2) After it is introduced, how many hours a week for how many years should be devoted to it? " (3) How many hours a week for how many years should be devoted to it during the last four years of the complete course ; that is, during the ordinary high school period? " (4) What topics, or parts, of the subject may reasonably be covered during the whole course ? " (5) What topics, or parts, of the subject may best be reserved for the last four years? " (6) In what form and to what extent should the subject enter into college require- ments for admission? Such questions as to the sufficiency of translation at sight as a test REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 195 of knowledge of a language, or the superiority of a laboratory examination in a scientific sub- ject to a written examination on a text-book, are intended to be suggested under this head by the phrase 'in what form.' " (7) Should the subject be treated differ- ently for pupils who are going to college, for those who are going to a scientific school, and for those who, presumably, are going to neither ? " (8) At what stage should this differentia- tion begin, if any be recommended? " (9) Can any description be given of the best method of teaching this subject through- out the school course? " (10) Can any description be given of the best mode of testing attainments in this sub- ject at college admission examinations? " (11) For those cases in which colleges and universities permit a division of the ad- mission examinations into a preliminary and a final examination, separated by at least a year, can the best limit between the preliminary and final examinations be approximately defined?" The first impression produced by a study 196 KEEOEM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION of the reports of the special conferences is that their members addressed themselves to their task with marked skill and directness. The questions submitted to them are answered, and answered fully, and the answers are ac- companied with the reasons therefor. From the standpoint of the old-fashioned prepara- tory schoolmaster, ignorant alike of the newer school subjects and of the newer methods of imparting life to the old ones, the changes urged by the conferences may seem many and radical. Yet it will be difficult to disprove the deliberate conclusion of the Committee of Ten that, on the whole, the spirit of the con- ferences was conservative and moderate. For example, the Latin conference distinctly dis- claim any desire to see the college admission requirements in Latin increased. The Greek conference prefer to see the average age of entrance to college lowered rather than raised. The mathematics conference recommend the actual abridging of the time now devoted to arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. The geog- raphy conference agree that the time now spent upon that subject in the schools is out EEFOEM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 197 of all proportion to the value of the results secured. As a matter of course, the conferences that dealt with the modern languages and the several departments of natural science had the largest amount of work to do. Greek, Latin, and mathematics have been sta- ple school subjects for generations. They are carefully organized and graded. Adequate text-books are provided. A large body of teaching experience lies behind each of them. Of the other subjects this is not true. They appear only sporadically in schools. Too often they are taught badly, and their edu- cational value is lost. The conferences deal- ing with the modern subjects make it clear, in every case, how these evils may be avoided ; but their reports are correspond- ingly longer and more minute than those on the other subjects. The conference on physics, astronomy, and chemistry, for ex- ample, append to their report an elaborate outline of experiments to be performed and topics to be taught in the secondary school. The reports from the conferences on his- 198 KEFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION tory, civil government, and political econ- omy, geography, and natural history are similarly detailed. The recommendations of the conference on English will naturally be turned to first ; for the tendency to emphasize the importance of the study of the mother tongue, and to improve the methods of teaching it, is now too strong and too general to be resisted, if indeed any one wishes to resist it. The report of this conference is very short, but it is extremely clear and cogent. In sub- stance, it says that the proper use of Eng- lish can be gained only by using it properly in exercises of increasing difficulty and vari- ety. The spelling-book is discountenanced. Formal grammar is relegated to the subor- dinate place that it deserves. The reading- book should contain real literature, and not articles on physical science or natural his- tory, and but little sentimental poetry. In the high school it is held that English should have as much time allotted to it as Latin, and that the two points to be kept con- stantly in mind, in the teaching, are the KEFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 199 study of literature and training in the ex- pression of thought. All this advice is so sound that, being now given a quasi-official authority, it should be followed generally in the secondary schools, both public and private. The fact that education cannot be cut up into artificial periods distinct in themselves is brought out by almost every conference. They agree in saying that the elementary school must improve, and must cooperate with the secondary school, if the latter is to meet the demands now made upon it. Eng- lish teaching cannot be neglected from six to thirteen, if good results in it are to be obtained from thirteen to seventeen. It is facts like this that give the reports of the conferences their chief significance. Though dealing ostensibly and directly with second- ary education only, they reach every nook and corner of the elementary school as well. It is extremely encouraging, also, to find the nine conferences and the Committee of Ten, one hundred teachers in all, in cordial agreement on many points of fundamental I 200 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION importance. It is laid down, for instance, that no school subject should be taught in different ways to pupils who are going to college, to a scientific school, or to neither. If a pupil studies algebra or Latin, he should study it in the same way and to the same extent, during the time that he studies it, whether he is to enter Harvard or Yale, the Institute of Technology or the Rensselaer Polytechnic, or a merchant's office. On this point there is not a single dissenting voice. This one principle, if followed in the sec- ondary schools, would immensely simplify their programmes and decrease the cost of their instruction. The conferences agree, again, — excepting the Greek conference, the members of which had no reason for dealing with the subject, — that much work now taken up for the first time in the secondary school should be begun in the elementary school. For instance, one foreign language, history, alge- bra, and geometry are all capable of excel- lent use in the upper grades of elementary schools, and are already to be found there REFOKM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 201 in some of the more progressive cities of the country. The discussion on shortening and enriching the school curriculum, begun so recently, has already accomplished this. The four conferences on language study and the three on natural science also agree among themselves as to the best methods of teaching. The former are a unit in desir- ing reading aloud in the language to be studied, the association of writing the lan- guage with translating from it, and the care- ful correction of translation, in order to secure in it the use of accurate and idio- matic English. The three scientific confer- ences come to a like agreement. They all believe that laboratory teaching is better than text-book teaching, and that the inspec- tion of laboratory notebooks should be com- bined with written examinations, in testing a pupil's attainments. The last, and most important, point of agreement among the conferences relates to the coordination of the studies in the cur- riculum. Neither the Committee of Ten nor the conferences contained a single person 202 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION who may be classed as a follower of the Herbartian educational theory, as exempli- fied by Ziller, Stoy, and Rein ; yet by purely empirical methods the committee and the conferences arrive at a striking confirma- tion of one of the main doctrines of the Herbartian school, the coordination and cor- relation of studies. The scientific confer- ences show how the practice of writing accurate descriptions of observations and experiments contributes to the acquirement of a clear, simple English style. The con- ference on history wish to have that subject always associated with the study of geogra- phy, and the conference on the latter subject agree with them. The English conference explicitly ask that the study of the mother tongue and its literature be supplemented by that of the history and geography of the English-speaking race. Taking these points alone, and passing over the numerous questions of detail on which the conferences pronounce, we have a considerable body of educational doctrine that is sound to the core, and that applies REFOEM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 203 to one school and to one stage of educa- tion as well as to another. Principals of schools, teachers of special subjects, and students of education will examine and weigh carefully every recommendation of the conferences, however minute ; but the general reader and the intelligent parent wish most of all to gain an idea of what is unanimously, or even generally agreed upon. That question is substantially answered in the foregoing summary of the conference reports. To study carefully the several conference reports, and to base upon them a general rec- ommendation to the country, was the more difficult part of the task of the Committee of Ten. Any recommendation, to be tangible, must of course include a schedule showing how a school can arrange its programme so as to carry out the ideal of the committee. Four such schedules, or tables, are given by the committee ; and while not perfect, — what school programme is ? — they are extremely suggestive. The first table is not a pro- gramme, but an ordered arrangement, by topics 204 REFOEM or SECONDARY EDUCATION and school j^ears, of all of the recommendations of the nine conferences. It offers material for an indefinite number of programmes. The second table is given to test the practical char- acter of the conference recommendations. It includes them all in a four years' course, adding to each subject the number of weekly periods to be allotted to it. When this is done, it is found that for three-fourths of the course much more is demanded than any one pupil can follow, but — and this is the important point — not more than a school can teach. The ne- cessary consequence is that there must be in the high school a choice or election of studies. In a small school, this choice will be made by the principal, who will say : " With the staff at my command, I can teach only five subjects of those proposed by the conferences, in the manner recommended. My school shall therefore be limited to those five." Larger and richer schools can teach more, or perhaps all of the subjects ; and then the choice among them will be made by the pupil. This choice is necessary, as the Committee of Ten is care- ful to point out, to thoroughness, and to the REFOEM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 205 imparting of power as distinguished from mere information; for any large subject whatever, to yield its training value, must be pursued through several years, from three to five times a week. The committee's third table is based on the second, but uses four as the standard number of weekly periods of study for each subject, except in the first year of a new language. Further reference to this table is unnecessary. The fourth table submitted is of great interest, for in it the committee, after due deliberation, makes its own selection out of all the material and suggestions supplied by the conferences, and submits specimen standard programmes of secondary school work. It would be a grave error to dismiss this ques- tion of a specific programme as one involving mere detail that might be left to any principal or superintendent of schools. The Committee of Ten itself dissents strongly from that view ; for it believes that to establish just proportions between the several subjects, or groups of allied subjects, it is essential that each prin- cipal subject shall be taught adequately and 206 EEFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION extensively, and therefore proper provision for it must be made in the programme. As the committee says : " The method of estimating the amount of instruction offered in any sub- ject by the number of recitation periods as- signed to it each week for a given number of years or half years is in some respects an inadequate one, for it takes no account of the scope and intensity of the instruction given during the periods ; but so far as it goes it is trustworthy and instructive. It represents with tolerable accuracy the proportional ex- penditure which a school is making on a given subject ; therefore the proportional importance which the school attaches to that subject. It also represents, roughly, the proportion of the pupil's entire school time which he can devote to a given subject, provided he is free to take all the instruction offered in that subject. All experience shows that subjects deemed impor- tant get a large number of weekly periods, while those deemed unimportant get a smaller number. Moreover, if the programme time assigned to a given subject be insufficient, the value of that subject as training cannot be got, EEFORM OE SECONDARY EDUCATION 207 no matter how good the quality of the instruc- tion." In framing the suggestive programmes, the Committee of Ten proceeded upon some gen- eral principles that are of great significance. In the first place, it endeavored to postpone to as late a period as possible the grave choice between a classical and what is generally known as a Latin-scientific course. Very fre- quently this choice determines a boy's future career, and it is important that it be made not only late in the school course, but after excursions into all the principal fields of knowledge have discovered the boy's tastes and exhibited his qualities. A second prin- ciple is that each year of the secondary school course should be, so far as may be, complete in itself, and not made wholly de- pendent on what is to follow. This is essen- tial, because thousands of pupils are obliged to leave the high school after one or two years, and during that time linguistic, historical, mathematical, and scientific subjects should all be presented to them in an adequate man- ner. It is also important that provision be 208 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION made so that each subject may be treated in the same way for all pupils who take it ; that time enough be given to each subject to gain from it the training it is able to give ; that the different principal subjects be put upon an approximate equality in the matter of time- allotment ; that all short courses given for purposes of information only be excluded ; and that the instruction in each of the main lines — namely, language, history, science, and mathematics — be continuous. With all of these principles in mind, the Committee of Ten framed the four specimen programmes given on the three following pages, the names by which they are designated being based on the amount and character of foreign language study in each. In adopting twenty as the maximum num- ber of weekly periods of school work, the com- mittee had two qualifications in mind : first, that at least five of the twenty should be given to unprepared work ; secondly, that laboratory subjects should have double periods whenever that prolongation is possible. Such subjects as music, drawing, and elocution, often found in secondary schools, are purposely omitted from REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 209 PS I Classical Three Foreign Languages (one Modern) II LATrN-SciENTIFIO Two Foreign Languages (one Modern) 1 Latin . . . . . 5 p.i English 4 p. Algebra .... 4 p. History 4 p. Physical Geography 3 p. 20 p. Latin 5 p. English 4 p. Algebra 4 p. History 4 p. Physical Geography 3 p. 20 p. 2 Latin 5 p. English 2 p. German'2 ^q^. French] begun .... 4 p. Geometry .... 3 p. Physics 3 p. History .... 3 p. Latin 5 p. English 2 p. German [or French] begun .... 4 p. Geometry .... 3 p. Physics 3 p. Botany or Zoology . 3 p. 20 p. 20 p. 3 Latin 4 p. Greek 2. .... 5 p. English 3 p. German [or French] 4 p. Mathematics Algebra, 2^ , Geometry, 2 / * ' * P" Latin 4 p. English 3 p. German [or French] 4 p. Mathematics Algebra, 2 ") . Geometry ,2 / ' ' * ^• Astronomy (J year) and Meteorology (iyr.) . . . . 3p. History 2 p. 20 p. 20 p. 1 Weekly periods. 2 In any school in which Greek can be better taught than a modem language, or in which local public opinion or the history of the school makes it desirable to teach Greek in an ample way, Greek may be substituted for German or French in the second year of the classical programme. 210 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 1 Classical Three Foreign Languages (one Modern) II Latin-Scientific Two Foreign Languages (one Modern) Latin 4 p. Greek 5 p. English 2 p. German [or French] 3 p. Chemistry .... 3 p. Trigonometry and Higher Algebra, or History ... 3 p. 20 p. Latin 4 p. English as in Classical, 2 \ additional, 2 / German [or French] Chemistry .... Trigonometry and Higher Algebra, or History . . . Geology or Physiog- raphy (Jyr.),and Anatomy, Physi- ology, and Hygiene iiji'.) . . . ■ 3 p. 20 p. 4 p. 3 p. 3 p. 3 p. « 1 Two Foreig-n Languages (both One Foreign Language (Ancient Modern) or Modern) French [or German] 4 p. Latin, or German, or English 3 p. French .... 4 p. German [or French] 4 p. English Mathematics as in others, 3 ") additional, 2 j ' 5 p. Algebra, 2 ) Geometry, 2 / * " 4 p. Mathematics Astronomy (J year) Algebra, 2 1 Geometry, 2 j " " 4 p. 3 and Meteorology ayr.) .... 3 p. Astronomy (^ yr.) History 2 p. and Meteorology (iyr.) .... History as in Latin-Scien- j tific, 2 1 additional, 2 ' 3 p. 3 p. 20 p. 30 p. French [or German] 3 p. Latin, or German, or English French .... 4 p. as in Classical, 2 "> additional, 2 ( 4 p. English as in Classical, 2 1 additional, 2 / 4 p. German [or French] 4 p. Chemistry .... 3 p. Chemistry .... 3 p. Trigonometry and History 3 p. 4 Higher Algebra, Trigonometry and or History . . . 3 p. Higher Algebra . 3 p. Geology or Physiog- Geology or Physiog- raphy (J yr. and raphy (Jyr.), and Anatomy, Physi- Anatomy, Physi- ology, and Hygiene ology, and Hygiene Qyr.) .... 3 p. Qyr.) .... 3 p. 20 p. 20 p. 212 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION the programmes, it being left to local authorities to determine how they shall be introduced. Inspection will show how carefully the pro- grammes have been framed with reference to being carried out economically in a single school. With few exceptions, the several sub- jects occur simultaneously in at least three of the four programmes, and with the same num- ber of weekly periods allotted to them. From a practical point of view this is a most impor- tant arrangement. Some minor difficulties were caused by adhering to the rule laid down by all of the language conferences, namely, that two foreign languages should not be begun at the same time, and by limiting the course to four years. A six years' programme would be far easier to construct. Critical examination of the committee's pro- grammes discloses grave defects in the most important of all, the classical, — which does not provide continuous study in science, for that great department is not represented in the third year at all. History is similarly inter- fered with, and there would also be a break in the mathematical course if the option given in KEFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 213 the fourth year were exercised in favor of his- tory. The difficulty lies, I believe, in trying to include history in a four years' classical course. The classics themselves teach history in an admirable way, if the instruction is good. A wealth of historical knowledge is grouped about the reading of Csesar, Cicero, and Virgil, Xenophon and Homer, the usual secondary school authors ; and in those which are themselves professedly historical, a great gain would follow from more thorough study of the subject matter. If history, then, were dropped entirely from this programme, a mod- ern language could be begun in the first sec- ondary school year, the English course extended in the second year, and no break in the science instruction would be necessary. Defects in the other programmes exist, but they are not so glaring as those just pointed out in the classical. For instance, there is no continuity in the history course of the Latin- scientific or modern language programme ; and in both of the last-named there would be a break in the mathematics course also, should the pupil exercise his option in favor of history. 214 REFOEM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION The following table discloses at a glance in what relation the four programmes stand to each of the four great divisions of secondary school study. The figures in the several col- umns represent the total number of weekly periods given during the entire four years, in each of the four programmes, to the main sub- jects. No scheme can be called radical that pro- poses to give 52.5 per cent of all secondary edu- cation whatsoever to language study, or, adding history, 62.8 per cent to the so-called humanities. That this would be the result of following the committee's recommendations the table shows. < 2 Q o fa 1 Language 50 42 42 34 168 History 7 6 6 14 33 Mathematics .... 14 14 14 14 56 Natural Science . . . 9 18 18 18 63 Total 80 80 80 80 320 This table brings out other interesting facts. It shows how closely allied are the Latin- REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION 215 scientific and modern language courses, and how small a part natural science is to play in the revised scheme, after all. The one-quarter of the whole school time that the scientific conferences asked to have given to natural science is not so given in any of the pro- grammes, though it is closely approached in three of them. Although the report itself contains no refer- ence to European experience or practice, it will be interesting to compare the committee's recommendations with the programmes of Eu- ropean secondary schools. Take, for example, the Prussian gymnasium, the tertia and se- cunda of which nearly correspond to the American secondary school years, and the French lycee, where the classes known as cinquieme, quatrieme, troisieme, and seconde are in about the same relation. The division of time in these institutions is shown on the following page. 216 REFORM OF SECONDARY EDUCATION PEUSSIAN GYMNASIUM CA