UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF CAPT. AND MRS. 
 PAUL MCBRIDE PERIGORD
 
 Y of 
 /V T 
 
 ANGELES 
 LIBRARY
 
 THE 
 
 NEW EDUCATION 
 
 THREE PAPERS 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE HERBERT PALMER 
 
 PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN 
 HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 
 1887 
 
 144626
 
 Copyright, 1887, 
 BY GEORGE HERBERT PALMER. 
 
 JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 r 
 
 "N this little book I have attempted to 
 explain to non-professional people some 
 recent tendencies in education which have 
 been much misunderstood. A mode of 
 college discipline which, when rightly em- 
 .ff ployed, proves a powerful engine for ma- 
 p^ turing the character of students has been 
 K supposed, both by advocates and oppo- 
 * nents, to be a contrivance for letting boys 
 cj do as they please. Laissez-faire methods, 
 -t-i let-alone methods, have been confused in 
 ** many minds with elective methods. To 
 clear up this confusion I have exhibited 
 here in some detail the safeguards which 
 a well-contrived elective system throws 
 around its students. I have tried to show
 
 iv PREFACE. 
 
 the ethical principles on which wise elec- 
 tion rests ; and I have drawn attention to 
 the special conditions of our time which 
 at present render some sort of elective 
 system a necessity. I hope such a sur- 
 vey will throw light on the question how a 
 young student may encounter most safely 
 the risks which his transformation into 
 manhood involves. The dangers of the 
 evolutionary period are great. We are not 
 likely to guard against them adequately till 
 we see that the opportunity of personal 
 choice is a necessary part of the cure, 
 as it unquestionably is the cause, of our 
 perplexities. 
 
 The three papers which make up the 
 book were first published in the "Ando- 
 ver Review," in the numbers for Novem- 
 ber, 1885, December, 1886, and January, 
 1887. They are now printed substantially 
 as originally written. Although in time 
 of publication so far apart, they form a 
 connected series. The first announced a 
 thesis which soon met vigorous opposition.
 
 PREFACE. V 
 
 Some writers directly attacked my views ; 
 some described institutions where my 
 problems were solved in other, and, as the 
 writers believed, in better ways. The more 
 important of these antagonistic articles are 
 the following : Education New and Old ; 
 G. T. Ladd, Andover Review, January, 
 1886. The Elective System of the Univer- 
 sity of Virginia ; J. M. Garnett, Ibid. 
 April. The Group System of Studies in 
 the Johns Hopkins University ; D. C. Gil- 
 man, Ibid. June. Individualism in Educa- 
 tion ; J. H. Denison, Ibid. The Harvard 
 "New Education;" G. H. Howison, Ibid. 
 The "New Education" at Harvard and 
 Yale ; New Englander, March. The Elec- 
 tive Policy ; D. H. Chamberlain, Ibid. May. 
 The System of Instruction and Government 
 at Harvard College ; Samuel Brearley, Jr., 
 New York, G. P. Putnam, 1885. Presi- 
 dent Eliofs Report ; A. F. West, Indepen- 
 dent, May 6, 13, 1886. The Elective Sys- 
 tem at the University of Michigan ; W. H. 
 Pettee, Nation, May 13, 20, 1886.
 
 VI PREFACE. 
 
 These articles confirmed my confidence 
 in the elective principle, but they also 
 convinced me that a much more elaborate 
 exposition of it was needed when men so 
 earnest and candid as my critics could 
 believe that in opposing election they were 
 doing education a service. To this supple- 
 mentary exposition, and to an examination 
 of other possible methods, the last two 
 papers are devoted. 
 
 It should always be borne in mind that 
 the particular modes of choice described as 
 now in use at Harvard are no finalities. 
 Undoubtedly they will soon be bettered 
 in other colleges ; bettered too, I hope, at 
 Harvard every year. Already changes in 
 the methods of religious instruction and 
 in the marking system have carried vivify- 
 ing influences into tracts of college life 
 hitherto left sterile. Other changes will 
 follow. Special forms do not abide. Yet 
 I believe there is a tolerably well deter- 
 mined ideal of educated manhood toward 
 which most of our colleges are moving.
 
 PREFACE. Vii 
 
 The perception of this steadfast ideal 
 makes many otherwise bewildering changes 
 intelligible. To point out what this ideal 
 .is, and so to purify and strengthen its 
 influence, is the object of my writing. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, 
 
 Feb. 21, 1887.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION 
 
 PACK 
 
 ii 
 
 POSSIBLE LIMITATIONS OF THE ELECTIVE 
 
 SYSTEM. 1 50 
 
 POSSIBLE LIMITATIONS OF THE ELECTIVE 
 
 SYSTEM. II 107
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 TOURING the year 1884-85 the Fresh- 
 men of Harvard College chose a ma- 
 jority of their own studies. Up to that 
 time no college, so far as I know, allowed 
 its first year's men any choice whatever. 
 Occasionally, one modern language has 
 been permitted rather than another; and 
 where colleges are organized by " schools," 
 
 that is, with independent groups of 
 studies each leading to a different degree, 
 
 the freshman by entering one school 
 turns away from others, and so exercises a 
 kind of selection. But with these possible 
 exceptions, the same studies have always 
 been required of all the members of a 
 given freshman class. Under the new
 
 12 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 Harvard rules, but seven sixteenths of the 
 work of the freshman year will be pre- 
 scribed ; the entire remainder of the 
 college course, with the exception of a 
 few exercises in English composition, will 
 be elective. A fragment of prescribed 
 work so inconsiderable is likely in time 
 to disappear. At no distant day the Har- 
 vard student may mark out for himself 
 his entire curriculum from entrance to 
 graduation. 
 
 Even if this probable result should not 
 follow, the present step toward it is too 
 significant to be passed over in silence, for 
 it indicates that after more than half a 
 century of experiment the Harvard Fac- 
 ulty are convinced of the worth of the 
 elective system. In their eyes, option is 
 an engine of efficiency. People generally 
 treat it as a concession. Freedom is con- 
 fessedly agreeable ; restive boys like it ; 
 let them have as much as will not harm 
 them. But the Harvard authorities mean 
 much more than this. They have thrown
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 13 
 
 away that established principle of Amer- 
 ican education, that every head should con- 
 tain a given kind of knowledge ; and 
 having already organized their college 
 from the top almost to the bottom on a 
 wholly different plan, they now declare that 
 their new principle has been proved so 
 safe and effective that it should supplant 
 the older method, even in that year where 
 students are acknowledged to be least 
 capable of self-direction. On what facts 
 do they build such confidence ? What do 
 they mean by calling their elective principle 
 a system ? Does not the new method, 
 while rendering education more agreeable, 
 tend to lower its standard ? Or, if it suc- 
 ceeds in stimulating technical scholarship, 
 is it equally successful in fostering char- 
 acter and in forming vigorous and law- 
 revering men ? These questions I propose 
 to answer, for they are questions which 
 every friend of Harvard, and indeed of 
 American education, wishes people press- 
 ingly to ask. Those most likely to ask
 
 14 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 them are quiet, God-fearing parents, who, 
 having bred their sons to a sense of duty, 
 expect college life to broaden and consoli- 
 date the discipline of the home. These are 
 the parents every college wants to reach. 
 Their sons, whether rich or poor, are the 
 bone and sinew of the land. In my judg- 
 ment the new education, once understood, 
 will appeal to them more strongly than 
 to any other class. But it is not easy to 
 understand it. My own understanding of 
 it has been of slow growth. When, in 
 1870, I left Andover Seminary and came 
 to teach at Harvard, I distrusted the more 
 extreme developments of the elective sys- 
 tem. Up to 1876, I opposed the introduc- 
 tion of voluntary attendance at recitations. 
 Not until four years ago did I begin to 
 favor the remission of Greek in the requi- 
 sites for entrance. In all these cases my 
 party was defeated; my fears proved 
 groundless ; what I wished to accomplish 
 was effected by means which I had op- 
 posed. I am therefore that desirable per-
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 15 
 
 suader, the man who has himself been 
 persuaded. The misconceptions through 
 which I passed, I am sure beset others. 
 I want to clear them away, and to present 
 some of the reasons which have turned me 
 from an adherent of the old to an apostle 
 of the new faith. 
 
 An elementary misconception deserves 
 a passing word. The new system is not a 
 mere cutting of straps ; it is a system. Its 
 student is still under bonds, bonds more 
 compulsive than the old, because fitted 
 with nicer adjustment to each one's person. 
 On H. M. S. Pinafore the desires of every 
 sailor receive instant recognition. The 
 new education will not agree to that. It 
 remains authoritative. It will not subject 
 its student to alien standards, nor treat his 
 deliberate wishes as matters of no conse- 
 quence ; but it does insist on that author- 
 ity which reveals to a man his own better 
 purposes and makes them firmer and finer 
 than they could have become if directed 
 by himself alone. What the amount of a
 
 1 6 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 young man's study shall be, and what its 
 grade of excellence, a body of experts de- 
 cides. The student himself determines its 
 specific topic. Everybody knows how far 
 this is from a prescribed system ; not so 
 many see that it is at a considerable re- 
 move from unregulated or nomadic study. 
 An American at a German university, or 
 at a summer school of languages, applies 
 for no degree and is under no restraint. 
 He chooses whatever studies he likes, ten 
 courses or five or one ; he works on them 
 as much as suits his need or his caprice ; 
 he submits what he does to no test ; he 
 receives no mark ; the time he wastes is 
 purely his own concern. Study like this, 
 roving study, is not systematic at all. It 
 is advantageous to adult students, to 
 those alone whose wills are steady, and 
 who know their own wants precisely. 
 Most colleges draw a sharp distinction 
 between the small but important body of 
 students of this class special students, 
 as they are called and the great company
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. I/ 
 
 of regulars. 1 These latter are candidates 
 for a degree, are under constant inspec- 
 tion, and are moved along the line only as 
 they attain a definite standard in both the 
 quantity and quality of their work. After 
 accomplishing the studies of the freshman 
 year, partly prescribed and partly elective, 
 a Harvard student must pass successfully 
 four elective courses in each of his subse- 
 quent three years. By " a course " is un- 
 derstood a single line of study receiving 
 three hours a week of instruction ; fifty 
 per cent of a maximum mark must be won 
 in each year in order to pass. Throwing 
 out the freshman year, the precise mean- 
 ing of the Harvard B. A. degree is there- 
 fore this : its holder has presented twelve 
 courses of study selected by himself, 
 and has mastered them at least half 
 perfectly. 
 
 Here, then, is the essence of the elective 
 system, fixed quantity and quality of 
 
 1 In 1884-85 the special students at Harvard, in the 
 college proper, numbered seventy.
 
 1 8 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 study, variable topic. Work and moderate 
 excellence are matters within everybody's 
 reach. It is not unfair to demand them of 
 all. If a man cannot show success some- 
 where, he is stamped if so facto a worthless 
 fellow. But into the specific topic of work 
 an element of individuality enters. To 
 succeed in a particular branch of study re- 
 quires fitness, taste, volition, incalculable 
 factors, known to nobody but the man 
 himself. Here, if anywhere, is the proper 
 field for choice ; and all American colleges 
 are now substantially agreed in accepting 
 the elective principle in this sense and ap- 
 plying it within the limits here marked 
 out. It is an error to suppose that elec- 
 tion is the hasty "craze" of a single col- 
 lege. Every senior class in New England 
 elects a portion of its studies. Every 
 important New England college allows 
 election in the junior year. Amherst, 
 Bowdoin, Yale, and Harvard allow it in 
 the sophomore. Outside of New England 
 the case is the same. It is true, all the
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 19 
 
 colleges except Harvard retain a modicum 
 of prescribed study even in the senior 
 year; but election in some degree is ad- 
 mitted everywhere, and the tendency is 
 steadily in the direction of a wider choice. 
 The truth is, Harvard has introduced the 
 principle more slowly than other colleges. 
 She was merely one of the earliest to be- 
 gin. In 1825, on the recommendation of 
 Judge Story, options were first allowed, in 
 modern languages. Twenty years of ex- 
 periment followed. In 1846 electives were 
 finally established for seniors and juniors ; 
 in 1867 for sophomores ; in 1884 for fresh- 
 men. But the old method was abandoned 
 so slowly that as late as 1871 some pre- 
 scribed study remained for seniors, till 
 1879 for juniors, and till 1884 for sopho- 
 mores. During this long and unnoticed 
 period, careful comparison was made be- 
 tween the new and old methods. A mass 
 of facts was accumulated, which subse- 
 quently rendered possible an extremely 
 rapid adoption of the system by other col-
 
 20 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 leges. Public confidence was tested. Com- 
 paring the new Harvard with the old, it is' 
 plain enough that a revolution has taken 
 place ; but it is a revolution like that in 
 the England of Victoria, wrought not by 
 sudden shock, but quietly, considerately, 
 conservatively, inevitably. Those who have 
 watched the college have approved ; the 
 time of transition has been a time of un- 
 exampled prosperity. For the last fifteen 
 years the gifts to the University have 
 averaged $250,000 a year. The steady in- 
 crease in students may be seen at a glance 
 by dividing the last twenty-five years into 
 five-year periods, and noting the average 
 number of undergraduates in each: 1861- 
 65, 423; 1866-70, 477; 1871-75, 657; 
 1876-80, 808; 1881-85, 873. 
 
 These facts are sufficient to show that 
 Harvard has reached her present great 
 prosperity by becoming the pioneer in 
 a general educational movement. What 
 made the movement general was the dread 
 of flimsy study. Our world is larger than
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 21 
 
 the one our grandfathers inhabited; it is 
 more minutely subdivided, more finely re- 
 lated, more subtly and broadly known. 
 The rise of physical science and the en- 
 largement of humanistic interests oblige 
 the college of to-day to teach elaborately 
 many topics which formerly were not 
 taught at all. Not so many years ago a 
 liberal education prepared men almost ex- 
 clusively for the four professions, preach- 
 ing, teaching, medicine, and law. In the 
 first century of its existence one half the 
 graduates of Harvard became ministers. 
 Of the graduates of the last ten years a full 
 third have entered none of the four profes- 
 sions. With a narrow field of knowledge, 
 and with students who required no great 
 variety of training, the task of a college 
 was simple. A single programme decently 
 covered the needs of all. But as the field 
 of knowledge widened, and men began to 
 notice a difference between its contents 
 and those of the college curriculum, an 
 effort was made to enlarge the latter by
 
 22 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 adding subjects from the former. Modern 
 languages crept in, followed by sciences, 
 political economy, new departments of his- 
 tory, literature, art, philosophy. For the 
 most part, these were added to the studies 
 already taught. But the length of college 
 days is limited. The life of man has not 
 extended with the extension of science. 
 To multiply subjects was soon found equiv- 
 alent to cheapening knowledge. Where 
 three subjects are studied in place of one, 
 each is pushed only one third as far. A 
 crowded curriculum is a curriculum of 
 superficialities, where men are forever oc- 
 cupied with alphabets and multiplication- 
 tables, elementary matters, containing 
 little mental nutriment. Thorough-going 
 discipline, the acquisition of habits of intel- 
 lectual mastery, calls for acquaintance with 
 knowledge in its higher ranges, and there 
 is no way of reaching these remoter re- 
 gions during the brief season of college 
 life except by dividing the field and press- 
 ing along paths where personal friction is
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 23 
 
 least. Accordingly, alternative options be- 
 gan to be allowed, at first between the new 
 subjects introduced, then between these 
 and the old ones. Liked or dreaded, op- 
 tion was a necessity ; but in its inevitable 
 adoption a new principle was introduced 
 whose germinal force could not afterwards 
 be stayed. The old conception had been 
 that there were certain matters a knowl- 
 edge of which constituted a liberal edu- 
 cation. Compared with the possession of 
 these, the temper of the receiving mind 
 was a secondary affair. This view became 
 untenable. Under the new conditions, 
 college Faculties were forced to recognize 
 personal aptitudes, and to stake intellec- 
 tual gains upon them. In assessing the 
 worth of studies, attention was thus with- 
 drawn from their subject-matter and trans- 
 ferred to the response they called forth in 
 the apprehender. Hence arose a new ideal 
 of education, in which temper of mind had 
 pre-eminence over quasita, the guidance of 
 the powers of knowing over the store of
 
 24 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 matters known. The new education has 
 accordingly passed through two stages of 
 development : first, in order to avoid super- 
 ficiality when knowledge was coming in 
 like a flood, it was found necessary to ad- 
 mit choice ; secondly, in the very necessity 
 of this admission was disclosed a more 
 spiritual ideal of the relation of the mind 
 of man to knowledge. 
 
 And this new ideal, I hold, should now 
 commend itself not as a thing good enough 
 if collateral, but as a principle, organic and 
 exclusive. To justify its dominance a sin- 
 gle compendious reason is sufficient : it up- 
 lifts character as no other training can, and 
 through influence on character it ennobles 
 all methods of teaching and discipline. We 
 say to our student at Harvard, " Study 
 Greek, German, history, or botany, what 
 you will ; the one thing of consequence is 
 that you should will to study something." 
 The moral factor is thus put forward, where 
 it belongs. The will is honored as of prime 
 consequence. Other systems treat it as
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 25 
 
 a merely concurrent and auxiliar force. 
 They try to smuggle it into operation 
 wrapped in a mass of matter-of-course per- 
 formances. It is the distinctive merit of 
 the elective system that it strips off dis- 
 guises, places the great facts of the moral 
 life in the foreground, forces the student to 
 be conscious of what he is doing, permits 
 him to become a partaker in his own work, 
 and makes him perceive that gains and 
 losses are immediately connected with a 
 volitional attitude. When such a con- 
 sciousness is aroused, every step in knowl- 
 edge becomes a step toward maturity. 
 There is no sudden transformation, but 
 the boy comes gradually to perceive that 
 in the determination of the will are found 
 the promise and potency of every form of 
 life. Many people seem to suppose that at 
 some epoch in the life of a young man the 
 capacity to choose starts up of itself, ready- 
 made. It is not so. Choice, like other 
 human powers, needs practice for strength. 
 To learn how to choose, we must choose.
 
 26 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 Keep a boy from exercising his will dur- 
 ing the formative period from eighteen to 
 twenty-two, and you turn him into the 
 world a child when by years he should be 
 a man. 1 To permit choice is dangerous ; 
 but not to permit it is more dangerous, for 
 it renders dependency habitual, places out- 
 side the character those springs of action 
 which should be set within it, treats personal 
 adhesion as of little account, and through 
 anxiety to shield a young life from evil 
 cuts it off from opportunities of virile good. 
 Even when successful, the directive process 
 breeds an excellence not to be desired. 
 Plants and stones commit no errors. They 
 are under a prescribed system and follow 
 given laws. Personal man is in continual 
 danger, for to self-direction is attached 
 the prerogative of sin. For building up a 
 moral manhood, the very errors of choice 
 are serviceable. 
 
 1 The average age of the students who entered Har- 
 vard last year was eighteen years and ten months. The 
 number considerably above or considerably below the 
 average is small in every class.
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 2/ 
 
 I am not describing theoretic advantages. 
 A manlier type of character actually ap- 
 pears as the elective principle extends. 
 The signs of the better life are not easy 
 to communicate to those who have not 
 lived in the peculiar world of a college. A 
 greater ease in uprightness, a quicker re- 
 sponse to studious appeal, a deeper seri- 
 ousness, still keeping relish for merriment, 
 a readier amenability to considerations of 
 order, an increase of courtesy, a growing 
 disregard of coarseness and vice, a decay 
 of the boyish fancy that it is girlish to 
 show enthusiasm, tendencies in these di- 
 rections, hardly perceptible to others, glad- 
 den the watchful heart of a teacher and 
 assure him that his work is not returning 
 to him void. Every company of young 
 men has a notion of what it is "gentle- 
 manly " to do. Into this current ideal the 
 most artificial and incongruous elements 
 enter. Perhaps it is counted " good form " 
 to haze a freshman, to wear the correctest 
 cut of trousers, to have a big biceps muscle,
 
 28 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 or to be reputed a man of brains. What- 
 ever the notion, it is allegiance to some 
 such blind ideal, rather than the acceptance 
 of abstract principles of conduct, which 
 guides a young man's life. To change 
 ever so little these influential ideals is the 
 ambition of the educator ; but they are per- 
 sistent things, held with the amazing con- 
 servatism of youth. When I say that a 
 better tone prevails as the elective system 
 takes root, I mean that I find the word 
 " gentleman," as it drops from student 
 mouths, enlarging and deepening its mean- 
 ing from year to year, departing from its 
 usage as a term of outward description and 
 drawing to itself qualities more interior. 
 Direct evidence on a matter so elusive can 
 hardly be given, but I can throw a few side- 
 lights upon it. Hazing, window-smashing, 
 disturbing a lecture-room, are things of the 
 past. The office of Proctor the literary 
 policeman of the olden time has become 
 a sinecure. Several years ago the Faculty 
 awarded Honorable Mention at graduation
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 29 
 
 to students who attained a high rank in three 
 or more courses of a single department. 
 The honor was not an exalted one, but 
 being well within the powers of all it soon 
 became "not quite the thing" to gradu- 
 ate without it. In the last senior class 
 91 men out of 191 received Honorable 
 Mention. 1 
 
 This last fact shows that a decent schol- 
 arship has become reputable. But more 
 than this is true : the rank which is reck- 
 oned decent scholarship is steadily rising. 
 I would not overstate the improvement. 
 The scale of marking itself may have risen 
 slightly. But taking the central scholar 
 of each class during the last ten years, 
 the scholar, that is, who stands midway 
 between the head and the foot, this 
 presumably average person has received 
 
 1 It is often asked whether a young man choosing 
 studies for himself will choose them coherently. Will 
 he not scatter among many subjects the attention which 
 should be concentrated ? These figures give the answer. 
 Nearly half the members of the last senior class chose 
 at least three closely related courses.
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 the following marks, the maximum being 
 100: 
 
 YEAR. 
 
 ts, 
 
 
 
 
 
 (s. 
 rx 
 
 | 
 
 00 
 
 r 
 
 ts. 
 
 f 
 
 00 
 
 t 
 
 00 
 
 & 
 
 4 
 
 f 
 
 1 
 
 
 CO 
 
 00 
 
 00 
 
 oo 
 
 oo 
 
 00 
 
 
 00 
 
 00 
 
 00 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Fresh. 
 
 59 
 
 55 
 
 57 
 
 56 
 
 62 
 
 62 
 
 65 
 
 67 
 
 64 
 
 63 
 
 Soph. 
 
 59 
 
 64 
 
 63 
 
 65 
 
 67 
 
 68 
 
 70 
 
 69 
 
 69 
 
 68 
 
 Jun. 
 
 67 
 
 65 
 
 66 
 
 6 7 
 
 70 
 
 68 
 
 72 
 
 75 
 
 72 
 
 72 
 
 Sen. 
 
 67 
 
 70 
 
 70 
 
 73 
 
 76 
 
 73 
 
 77 
 
 75 
 
 79 
 
 81 
 
 It will be observed that the marks in 
 this table become higher as the student ap- 
 proaches the end of his course and reaches 
 the years where the elective principle is 
 least restricted. Let the eye pass from 
 the left upper corner of the table to the 
 right lower corner and take in the full sig- 
 nificance of a change which has transformed 
 freshmen, doomed to prescribed studies and 
 half of them ranking below sixty per cent, 
 into seniors so energetic that half of them 
 win four fifths of a perfect mark in four 
 electives. It is not only the poor who are 
 affected in this way. About half the men
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 31 
 
 who appear on the Rank List each year 
 receive no pecuniary aid, and are probably 
 not needy men. 
 
 . But it may be suspected that high marks 
 mean easy studies. The many different 
 lines of work cannot be equally severe, and 
 it is said that those which call for least ex- 
 ertion will be sure to prove the favorites. 
 As this charge of "soft" courses is the 
 stock objection to the elective system, I 
 shall be obliged to examine it somewhat 
 minutely. Like most of the popular ob- 
 jections, it rests on an a priori assump- 
 tion that thus things must be. Statistics 
 all run the other way. Yet I am not sur- 
 prised that people believe it. I believed it 
 once myself when I knew nothing but pre- 
 scribed systems. Under these, it certainly 
 is true that ease is the main factor in 
 making a study popular. Where choice is 
 permitted, the factor of interest gets freer 
 play, and exerts an influence that would 
 not be anticipated by those who have never 
 seen it in operation. Severe studies are 
 often highly popular if the subject is at-
 
 32 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 tractive and the teaching clear. Here is a 
 list of the fifteen courses which in 1883-84 
 (the last year for which returns are com- 
 plete) contained the largest numbers of 
 seniors and juniors, those classes being at 
 that time the only ones which had no pre- 
 scribed studies : Mill's political economy, 
 125 seniors and juniors ; European history 
 from the middle of the eighteenth century, 
 102 ; history of ancient art, 80 ; compara- 
 tive zoology, 58 ; political and constitu- 
 tional history of the United States, 56 ; 
 psychology, 52 ; geology, 47 ; constitu- 
 tional government of England and the 
 United States, 45 ; advanced geology, with 
 field work, 43 ; Homer, sixteen books, 40 ; 
 ethics, 38 ; logic, and introduction to phi- 
 losophy, 38 ; Shakespeare, six plays, 37 ; 
 economic history, advanced course, 36 ; 
 legal history of England to the sixteenth 
 century, 35. In these years the senior and 
 junior classes together contained 404 men, 
 who chose four electives apiece. In all, 
 therefore, 1,616 choices were made. The 
 above list shows 832 ; so that, as nearly as
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 33 
 
 may be, one half of the total work of two 
 years is here represented. The other half 
 was devoted to interests more special, which 
 were pursued in smaller companies. Are 
 these choices unwise ? Are they not the 
 studies which should largely occupy a young 
 man's thoughts toward the close of his col- 
 lege life ? They are the ones most fre- 
 quently set for the senior and junior years 
 by colleges which retain prescribed studies. 
 From year to year choices differ a little. 
 The courses at the lower end of the list 
 may give place to others which do not ap- 
 pear here. I print the list simply to indi- 
 cate the general character of the studies 
 elected. In it appears only one out of 
 all the modern languages, and that, too, 
 a course in pure literature in which the 
 marking is not reputed tender. Another 
 year a course of French or German might 
 come in ; but ordinarily except when 
 chosen by specialists the languages, 
 modern and ancient, are elected most 
 largely during the sophomore year. Fol- 
 3
 
 34 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 lowing directly the prescribed linguistic 
 studies of the freshman year, they are de- 
 servedly among the most popular, though 
 not the easiest, courses. In nearly half the 
 courses here shown no text-book is used, 
 and the amount of reading necessary for 
 getting an average mark is large. A shelf 
 of books representing original authorities 
 is reserved by the instructor at the Library, 
 and the pupil is sent there to prepare his 
 work. 
 
 How, it will be asked, are choices so 
 judicious secured ? Simply by making 
 them deliberate. Last June studies were 
 chosen for the coming year. During the 
 previous month students were discussing 
 with one another what their electives should 
 be. How this or that course is conducted, 
 what are the peculiarities of its teacher, 
 what is the proportion in it between work 
 given and gains had, are matters which 
 then interest the inhabitants of Hollis 
 and Holyoke as stocks interest Wall 
 Street. Most students, too, have some
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 35 
 
 intimacy with one or another member of 
 the Faculty, to whom they are in the 
 habit of referring perplexities. This ad- 
 vice is now sought, and often discreetly 
 rejected. The Elective Pamphlet is for a 
 time the best-read book in college. The 
 perplexing question is, What courses to 
 give up ? All find too many which they 
 wish to take. The Pamphlet of this year 
 offers 189 courses, divided among twenty 
 departments. The five modern languages, 
 for example, offer, all told, thirty-four dif- 
 ferent courses : Sanskrit, Persian, Assyrian, 
 Hebrew, and Arabic, 14 ; Greek and Latin, 
 18 each; natural history, 19; physics and 
 chemistry, 18 ; mathematics, 18 ; history 
 and philosophy, 12 each ; the fine arts, 
 including music, 1 1 ; political economy, 7 ; 
 Roman law, 2. These numbers will show 
 the range of choice ; on its extent a great 
 deal of the efficiency of the system de- 
 pends. 1 After the electives are chosen 
 
 1 But a great deal of the expense also. How much 
 larger the staff of teachers must be where everything is
 
 36 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 and reported in writing to the Dean, the 
 long vacation begins, when plans of study 
 come under the scrutiny of parents, of the 
 parish minister, or of the college graduate 
 who lives in the next street. Until Sep- 
 tember 21, any elective may be changed 
 on notice sent to the Dean. During the 
 first ten days of the term, no changes are 
 allowed. This is a time of trial, when one 
 sees for himself his chosen studies. After- 
 wards, for a short time, changes are easy, 
 if the instructors consent. For the re- 
 mainder of the year no change is possible, 
 unless the reasons for change appear to 
 the Dean important. Other restrictions on 
 the freedom of choice will readily be un- 
 derstood without explanation. Advanced 
 studies cannot be taken till preliminary 
 ones are passed. Notices are published 
 by the French and German departments 
 
 taught to anybody than where a few subjects are offered 
 to all, may be seen by comparing the number of teachers 
 at Harvard 146, instructing 1,586 men with those 
 of Glasgow University in 1878 42, instructing 2,018 
 men.
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 37 
 
 that students who elect those languages 
 must be placed where proficiency fits them 
 to go. Courses especially technical in 
 character are marked with a star in the 
 Elective Pamphlet, and cannot be chosen 
 till the instructor is consulted. 
 
 By means like these the Faculty try to 
 prevent the wasting of time over unprofit- 
 able studies. Of course they do not suc- 
 ceed. I should roughly guess that a 
 quarter, possibly a third, of the choices 
 made might be improved. This estimate 
 is based on the answers I have received to 
 a question put to some fifty recent gradu- 
 ates : " In the light of your present ex- 
 perience, how many of your electives 
 would you change ? " I seldom find a 
 man who would not change some ; still 
 more rarely one who would change one half. 
 As I look back on my own college days, 
 spent chiefly on prescribed studies, I see 
 that to make these serve my needs more 
 than half should have been different. 
 There was Anglo-Saxon, for example, 
 
 144826
 
 38 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 which was required of all, no English 
 literature being permitted. A course in 
 advanced chemical physics, serviceable no 
 doubt to some of my classmates, came 
 upon me prematurely, and stirred so in- 
 tense an aversion to physical study that 
 subsequent years were troubled to over- 
 come it. One meagre meal of philosophy 
 was perhaps as much as most of us seniors 
 could digest, but I went away hungry for 
 more. I loved Greek, but for two years 
 I was subject to the instructions of a 
 certain professor, now dead, who was one 
 of the most learned scholars and unprofit- 
 able teachers I ever knew. Of the studies 
 which brought me benefit, few did so in 
 any vigorous fashion. Every reader will 
 parallel my experience from his own. Pre- 
 scribed studies may be ill-judged or ill- 
 adapted, ill-timed or ill-taught, but none 
 the less inexorably they fall on just and 
 unjust. The wastes of choice chiefly 
 affect the shiftless and the dull, men who 
 cannot be harmed much by being wasted.
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 39 
 
 The wastes of prescription ravage the 
 energetic, the clear-sighted, the original, 
 the very classes who stand in greatest 
 need of protection. What I would assert, 
 therefore, is not that in the elective system 
 we have discovered the secret of stopping 
 educational waste. That will go on as 
 long as men need teaching. I simply hold 
 that the monstrous and peculiarly perni- 
 cious wastes of the old system are now 
 being reduced to a minimum. Select 
 your cloth discreetly, order the best tailor 
 in town to make it up, and you will still 
 require patience for many misfits ; but 
 they will be fewer, at any rate, than 
 when garments are served out to you and 
 the whole regiment by the government 
 quartermaster. 
 
 Nobody who has taught both elective 
 and prescribed studies need be told how 
 the instruction in the two cases differs. 
 With perfunctory students, a teacher is 
 concerned with devices for forcing his 
 pupils onward. Teaching becomes a sec-
 
 40 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 ondary affair ; the time for it is exhausted 
 in questioning possible shirks. Infor- 
 mation must be elicited, not imparted. 
 The text-book, with its fixed lessons, is a 
 thing of consequence. It is the teacher's 
 business to watch his pupils, to see that 
 they carry off the requisite knowledge ; 
 their business, then, it soon becomes to 
 try to escape without it. Between teacher 
 and scholar there goes on an ignoble game 
 of matching wits, in which the teacher is 
 smart if he can catch a boy, and the boy 
 is smart if he can know nothing without 
 being found out. Because of this sup- 
 posed antagonism of interests American 
 higher education seldom escapes an air 
 of unreality. We seem to be at the opera 
 bouffe. A boy appears at the learning- 
 shop, purchases his parcel of knowledge, 
 and then tries to toss it under the counter 
 and dodge out of the door before the shop- 
 man can be quick enough to make him 
 carry off the goods. Nothing can cure 
 such folly except insistence that pupil's
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 4! 
 
 neglect is not teacher's injury. The elec- 
 tive system points out to a man that he 
 has something at stake in a study, and so 
 trains him to look upon time squandered 
 as a personal loss. Where this conscious- 
 ness can be presumed, a higher style 
 of teaching becomes possible. Methods 
 spring up unlike formal lectures, unlike 
 humdrum recitations. The student ac- 
 quires what he will need in after life 
 the power to look up a single subject 
 in many books. Theses are written ; dis- 
 cussions held ; in higher courses, prob- 
 lems of research supersede defined tasks. 
 During 1 860-61, fifty-six per cent of the 
 Harvard undergraduates consulted the 
 college library; during 1883-84, eighty- 
 five per cent. 
 
 In a similar way governmental problems 
 change their character. Formerly, it was 
 assumed that a student who followed his 
 own wishes would be indisposed to attend 
 recitations. Penalties were accordingly 
 established to compel him to come. At
 
 42 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 present, there is net one of his twelve 
 recitations a week which a Harvard stu- 
 dent might not "cut." Of course I do 
 not mean that unlimited absence is al- 
 lowed. Any one who did not appear for 
 a week would be asked what he was doing. 
 But for several years there has been no 
 mechanical regulation, so much absence, 
 so much penalty. I had the curiosity to 
 see how largely, under this system of trust, 
 the last senior class had cared to stay 
 away. I counted all absences, excused 
 and unexcused. Some men had been sick 
 for considerable periods ; some had been 
 worthless, and had shamelessly abused 
 their freedom. Reckoning in all mis- 
 deeds and all misfortunes, I found that 
 on the average each man had been absent 
 a little less than twice a week. 1 The test 
 
 1 Or sixteen per cent of his recitations. Readers 
 may like to compare this result with the number of 
 absences elsewhere. At a prominent New England 
 college, one of the best of those which require attend- 
 ance, a student is excused from ten per cent of his ex- 
 ercises. But this amount does not cover absences of
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 43 
 
 of high character is the amount of free- 
 dom it will absorb without going to pieces. 
 The elective system enlarges the capacity 
 to. absorb freedom undisturbed. 
 
 But it would be unfair to imply that the 
 new spirit is awakened in students alone. 
 Professors are themselves instructed. The 
 obstacles to their proper work, those sever- 
 est of all obstacles which come from de- 
 fective sympathy, are cleared away. A 
 teacher draws near his class, and learns 
 what he can do for it. Long ago it was 
 said that among the Gentiles people 
 spiritually rude great ones exercised au- 
 thority, while in a state of righteousness 
 this should not be so ; there the leader 
 would estimate his importance by his ser- 
 viceability. It was a teacher who spoke, 
 and he spoke to teachers. To-day teachers' 
 dangers lie in the same direction. Always 
 
 necessity, absences caused by sickness, by needs of 
 family, and by the many other perfectly legitimate hin- 
 drances to attendance. The percentage given for the 
 Harvard seniors includes all absences whatsoever.
 
 44 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 dealing with inferiors, isolated from criti- 
 cism, by nature not less sluggish than 
 others, through the honorable passion 
 which they feel for their subject disposed 
 to set the private investigation of it above 
 its exposition, teachers are continually 
 tempted to think of a class as if it existed 
 for their sakes rather than they for its. 
 Fasten pupils to the benches, and nothing 
 counteracts this temptation except that in- 
 dividual conscience which in all of us is a 
 faculty that will well bear strengthening. 
 It may be just to condemn the dull, the 
 intolerant, the self-absorbed teacher; but 
 why not condemn also the system which 
 perpetuates him ? Nobody likes to be 
 inefficient ; slackness is largely a fault of 
 inadvertence. That system is good which 
 makes inadvertence difficult and opens the 
 way for a teacher to discover whether his 
 instructions hit. Give students choice, 
 and a professor gets the power to see 
 himself as others see him. How this is 
 accomplished appears by examining three
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 45 
 
 possible cases. Suppose, in the first place, 
 I become negligent this year, am busy 
 with private affairs, and so content myself 
 with imparting nothing, with calling off 
 questions from a text-book, or with read- 
 ing my old lectures ; I shall find out my 
 mistake plainly enough next June, when 
 fewer men than usual elect my courses. 
 Suppose, secondly, I give my class impor- 
 tant matter, but put it in such a form that 
 young minds cannot readily 'assimilate it ; 
 the same effect follows, only in this case I 
 shall probably attract a small company of 
 the hardier spirits, in some subjects the 
 very material a teacher desires. Or sup- 
 pose, lastly, I seek popularity, aim at en- 
 tertainment, and give my pupils little work 
 to do ; my elective becomes a kind of sink, 
 into which are drained off the intellectual 
 dregs of the college. Other teachers will 
 get rid of their loafers ; I shall take them 
 in. But I am not likely to retain them. 
 A teacher is known by the company he 
 keeps. In a vigorous community a " soft "
 
 46 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 elective brings no honor to its founder. I 
 shall be apt to introduce a little stiffening 
 into my courses each year, till the appear- 
 ance of the proper grade of student tells 
 me I am proved to have a value. There 
 is, therefore, in the new method a self- 
 regulating adjustment. Teacher and taught 
 are put on their good behavior. A spirit 
 of faithfulness is infused into both, and by 
 that very fact the friendliest relation is 
 established between them. 
 
 I have left myself little room to explain 
 why the elective system should be begun 
 as early as the freshman year, and surely 
 not much room is needed. A system 
 proved to exert a happy influence over 
 character, and thence over manners and 
 scholarly disposition, is exactly the matur- 
 ing agency needed by the freshman of 
 eighteen. It is the better suited to him 
 because the early years of college life are 
 its least valuable portion, which can bear, 
 therefore, most economically the disciplin- 
 ing losses sure to come when a student is
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 47 
 
 learning to choose. More than this, the 
 change from school-methods to character- 
 methods is too grave a one to be passed 
 over as an incident in the transition from 
 year to year. A change of residence 
 should mark it. It should stand at the 
 entrance to a new career. Parents should 
 be warned, and those who have brought 
 up their sons to habits of luxurious ease 
 should be made fully aware that a college 
 which appeals to character has no place for 
 children of theirs. Every mode of train- 
 ing has its exclusions. I prefer the one 
 which brings least profit to our danger- 
 ous classes the indolent rich. Leslie 
 Stephen has said that the only argument 
 rascals can understand is the hangman. 
 The only inducement to study, for boys of 
 loose early life, is compulsion. But for the 
 plain democratic many, who have sound 
 seed in themselves, who have known duty 
 early, and who have found in worthy 
 things their law and impulse, the elective 
 system, even during the freshman year,
 
 48 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 gives an opportunity for moral and mental 
 expansion such as no compulsory system 
 can afford. 
 
 Perhaps in closing I ought to caution 
 the reader that he has been listening to a 
 description of tendencies merely, and not 
 of completed attainment. In no college is 
 the New Education fully embodied. It is 
 an ideal, toward which all are moving, and 
 a powerfully influential ideal. In explain- 
 ing it, for the sake of simplicity I have 
 confined myself to tracing the working of 
 its central principle, and I have drawn my 
 illustrations from that Harvard life with 
 which I am most familiar. But simplicity 
 distorts ; the shadows disappear. I am 
 afraid I may seem to have hinted that the 
 Harvard training already comes pretty 
 near perfection. It does not let me say 
 so distinctly. We have much to learn. 
 Side by side with the nobler tendencies to 
 which I have directed attention, disheart- 
 ening things appear. The examination
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 49 
 
 paper still attacks learning on its intellec- 
 tual side, the marking system on its moral. 
 All I have sought to establish is this : 
 there is a method which we and many 
 other colleges in different degrees have 
 adopted, which is demonstrably a sound 
 method. Its soundness should by this 
 time be generally acknowledged, and criti- 
 cism should now turn to the important 
 work of bettering its details of operation. 
 May what I have written encourage such 
 criticism and help to make it wise, pene- 
 trative, and friendly.
 
 POSSIBLE LIMITATIONS OF THE 
 ELECTIVE SYSTEM. 
 
 I. 
 
 TN a paper published in the "Andover 
 -*- Review" of November, 1885, I called 
 attention to the fact that a new principle 
 is at work in American education. That 
 principle, briefly stated, is this : the student 
 now consciously shares in his own upbuild- 
 ing. His studies are knitted closely to his 
 personal life. Under this influence a new 
 species of power is developed. Scholarship 
 broadens and deepens, boyishness dimin- 
 ishes, teacher and pupil meet less artifi- 
 cially. The college, as an institution, wins 
 fresh life. Public confidence awakens ; 
 pupils, benefactions, flow in. Over what 
 I wrote an eager controversy has arisen, 
 a controversy which must have proved
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 51 
 
 instructive to those who need instruction 
 most. In the last resort questions of edu- 
 cation are decided by educators, as those 
 of sanitation by sanitary engineers ; but 
 in both cases the decision has reference to 
 public needs, and people require to be in- 
 structed in the working of appliances which 
 are designed for their comfort. There is 
 danger that such instruction may not be 
 given. Professional men become absorbed 
 in their art and content themselves with 
 reticence, leaving the public ignorant of 
 the devices by which its health is to be 
 preserved. A great opportunity, therefore, 
 comes to the common householder when 
 these professional men fall foul of one 
 another. In pressing arguments home they 
 frequently take to ordinary speech, and 
 anybody who then lends an ear learns of 
 the mysteries. The present discussion, I 
 am sure, has brought this informatory gain 
 to every parent who reads the " Andover 
 Review" and has a studious boy. The 
 gain will have been greater because of the
 
 52 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 candor and courtesy with which the attack- 
 ing party has delivered its assault. The 
 contest has been earnest. Its issues have 
 been rightly judged momentous. For good 
 or for ill, the choice youth of the land are 
 to be shaped by whatever educational policy 
 finally wins. Yet, so far as I recall, no 
 unkind word has slipped from the pen of 
 one of my stout opponents ; no disparage- 
 ment of man or college has mixed with the 
 energetic advocacy of principle. The dis- 
 cussion has set in well toward things. I 
 cannot call this remarkable. Of course it 
 is not easy to be fair and strong at once. 
 Sweetness and light are often parted. Yet 
 we rightly expect the scholar's life to civil- 
 ize him who pursues it, and we anticipate 
 from books a refinement of the spirit and 
 the manners as well as the understanding. 
 My opponents have been scholars, and have 
 spoken as scholars speak. It is a pleasure 
 to linger in their kindly contentious com- 
 pany. So I gladly accept the invitation of 
 the editors of the " Review " to sum up our
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 53 
 
 discussion and to add some explanatory last 
 words. 
 
 The papers which have appeared fall 
 into two easily distinguishable classes, the 
 descriptive and the critical. To the former 
 I devote but a brief space, so much more 
 direct is the bearing of the latter on the 
 main topic of debate, the question, namely, 
 what course the higher education can and 
 what it cannot now take. Yet the descrip- 
 tive papers perform a service and deserve 
 a welcome word. Suspecting that I was 
 showing off Harvard rather favorably, pro- 
 fessors planted elsewhere have attempted 
 to make an equally favorable exhibit of 
 their own colleges. In my manifesto they 
 have seen "a coveted opportunity to bring 
 forward corresponding statistics which 
 have not been formed under the Harvard 
 method." Perhaps this was to mistake my 
 aim a little. I did intend to advance my 
 college in public esteem ; she deserves that 
 of me in everything I write. But primarily 
 I thought of myself as the expounder of an
 
 54 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 important policy, which happens to have 
 been longer perceived and more elaborately 
 studied at Harvard than elsewhere. I hope 
 I did not imply that Harvard, having this 
 excellence, has all others. She has many 
 weaknesses, which should not be shielded 
 from discerning discussion. Nor did I in- 
 tend to commit the injustice to Harvard 
 an injustice as gross as it is frequent 
 of treating her as a mere embodiment of 
 the elective system. Harvard is a complex 
 and august institution, possessed of all the 
 attractions which can be lent by age, tra- 
 dition, learning, continually renewed re- 
 sources, fortunate situation, widespread 
 clientage, enthusiastic loyalty, and forceful 
 guidance. She is the intellectual mother 
 of us all, honored certainly by me, and I 
 believe by thousands of others, for a mul- 
 tiplicity of subtle influences which stretch 
 far outside her special modes of instruction. 
 But for the last half century Harvard has 
 been developing a new and important pol- 
 icy of education. Coincident with this
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 55 
 
 development she has attained enormous 
 popular esteem and internal power. The 
 value and limits of this policy, the sources 
 of this esteem and power, I wish every- 
 body, colleges and populace, to scrutinize. 
 To make these things understood is to help 
 the higher education everywhere. 
 
 In undertaking this quasi philosophical 
 task, I count it a piece of good fortune to 
 have provoked so many lucid accounts of 
 what other colleges are doing. The more 
 of these the better. The public cannot be 
 too persistently reminded of the distinctive 
 merits of this college and of that. Let 
 each be as zealous as possible ; gains made 
 by one are gains for all. Depreciatory 
 rivalry between colleges is as silly as it is 
 when religious sects quarrel in the midst 
 of a perishing world. Probably such rival- 
 ries have their rise in the dull supposition 
 that a fixed constituency of pupils exists 
 somewhere, which if not turned toward 
 one college may be drawn to another. As 
 the old political economists tell of a " wages
 
 56 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 fund," fixed and constant in each com- 
 munity, so college governors are apt to 
 imagine a public pupil-hoard, not suscep- 
 tible of much increase or diminution, 
 which may by inadvertence fall into other 
 hands than their own. In reality each 
 college creates its constituency. Its stu- 
 dents come, in the main, from the inert 
 mass of the uncollegiate public. Only one 
 in eight among Harvard students is a son 
 of a Harvard graduate ; and probably the 
 small colleges beget afresh an even larger 
 percentage of their students. On this 
 account the small colleges have been a 
 power in the land. To disparage them 
 shall 'never be my office. In a larger de- 
 gree than the great universities they spread 
 the college idea among people who would 
 not otherwise possess it. The boy who 
 lives within fifty miles of one of them re- 
 flects whether he will or will not have a 
 college training. Were there no college in 
 the neighborhood, he might never consider 
 the matter at all. It is natural enough for
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 57 
 
 undergraduates to decry every college ex- 
 cept their own ; but those who love educa- 
 tion generously, and who seek to spread it 
 far and wide, cannot afford the luxury of 
 envy. One common danger besetting us 
 all should bind us together. In the allure- 
 ments of commerce boys may forget that 
 college is calling. They do forget it. 
 According to my computations the num- 
 ber of persons in the New England colleges 
 to-day is about the same as the number in 
 the insane asylums ; but little more than 
 the number of idiots. Probably this num- 
 ber is not increasing in proportion to pop- 
 ulation. Professor Newton, of Oberlin, 
 finds that the increase of students during 
 the ten years between 1870 and 1880, in 
 twenty of our oldest leading colleges, was 
 less than three and a half per cent, the 
 population of the United States increasing 
 during the same period twenty-three per 
 cent. In view of facts like these, careful 
 study of the line along which college 
 growth is still possible becomes a neces-
 
 58 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 sity. It will benefit all colleges alike. No 
 one engaged in it has a side to maintain. 
 We are all alike seekers. Whatever in- 
 structive experience any college can con- 
 tribute to the common study, and whatever 
 pupils she may thereby gain, will be matter 
 for general rejoicing. 
 
 To such a study the second, or critical, 
 class of papers furnish important stimulus ; 
 for these have not confined themselves to 
 describing institutions : they have gone 
 on to discuss the value and limits of the 
 principle which actuates the new educa- 
 tion everywhere. In many respects their 
 writers and I are in full accord. In moral 
 aim we always are, and generally, too, in 
 our estimate of the present status. We 
 all confess that the conditions of college 
 education have changed, that the field 
 of knowledge has enlarged, that a liberal 
 training nowadays must fit men for more 
 than the four professions of preaching, 
 teaching, medicine, and law. We agree 
 that the prescribed systems of the past are
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 59 
 
 outgrown. We do not want them. We 
 doubt whether they were well suited to 
 their own time ; we are sure they will 
 never fit ours. Readjustment of curricula, 
 we all declare, must be undertaken if the 
 higher education is to retain its hold on 
 our people. Further still, we agree in the 
 direction of this readjustment. My critics, 
 no less than I, believe that a widely ex- 
 tended scope must be given to individual 
 choice. With the possible exception of 
 Professor Denison, about whose opinion I 
 am uncertain, everybody who has taken 
 part in the controversy recognizes the 
 elective principle as a beneficial one and 
 maintains that in some form or other it 
 has come to stay. People generally are 
 not aware what a consensus of opinion on 
 this point late years have brought about. 
 To rid ourselves once for all of further 
 controversy let us weigh well the words of 
 my opponents. 
 
 Mr. Brearley begins his criticism ad- 
 dressed to the New York Harvard Club
 
 6O THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 thus : " We premise that every one ac- 
 cepts the elective principle. Some system 
 based on that principle must be established. 
 No one wants the old required systems 
 back, or any new required system." Pro- 
 fessor Howison says : " An elective sys- 
 tem, in its proper place, and under its 
 due conditions, is demonstrably sound." 
 Professor Ladd does not express himself 
 very fully on this point in the " Andover 
 Review," but his opinions may be learned 
 from the " New Englander " for January, 
 1885. When, in 1884, Yale College re- 
 formed its curriculum and introduced elec- 
 tive studies, it became desirable to instruct 
 the graduates about the reasons for a step 
 which had been long resisted. After a 
 brief trial of the new system, Professor 
 Ladd published his impressions of it. I 
 strongly commend his candid paper to the 
 attention of those who still believe the old 
 methods the safer. He asserts that "a 
 perfect and final course of college study is, 
 if not an unattainable ideal, at present an
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 6 1 
 
 impossible achievement." The considera- 
 tions which were " the definite and almost 
 compulsory reasons for instituting a com- 
 prehensive change " he groups under the 
 following heads : (i) the need of modern 
 languages ; (2) the crowding of studies 
 in the senior year ; (3) the heterogeneous 
 and planless character of the total course ; 
 (4) the need of making allowance for the 
 tastes, the contemplated pursuits, and the 
 aptitudes of the individual student. Sub- 
 stantially, these are the evils of prescrip- 
 tion which I pointed out ; only, in my 
 view, they are evils not confined to a 
 single year. Stating his observation of 
 the results of election, Professor Ladd 
 says : " Increased willingness in study, and 
 even a new and marked enthusiasm on the 
 part of a considerable number of students, 
 is another effect of the new course already 
 realized. The entire body of students in 
 the upper classes is more attentive, regular, 
 interested, and even eager, than ever be- 
 fore." " More intimate and effective rela-
 
 62 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 tions are secured in many cases between 
 teachers and pupils." 
 
 These convictions in regard to the effi- 
 ciency which the elective principle lends 
 to education are not confined to my critics 
 and myself. Let me cite testimony from 
 representatives of other colleges. The 
 last Amherst Catalogue records (page 24) 
 that " excellent results have appeared from 
 this [the elective] method. The special 
 wants of the student are thus met, his 
 zest and progress in his work are increased, 
 and his association with his teachers be- 
 comes thus more close and intimate." 
 President Robinson says, in his annual re- 
 port for 1885 to the Corporation of Brown 
 University: "There are advantages in a 
 carefully guarded system of optional stud- 
 ies not otherwise obtainable. The saving 
 of time in preparing for a special calling in 
 life is something, and the cumulative zeal 
 in given lines of study, where a gratified 
 and growing taste is ever beckoning on- 
 ward, is still more. But above all, some
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 63 
 
 provision for choice among ever-multiplying 
 courses of study has become a necessity." 
 In addressing the American Institute of 
 Instruction at Bar Harbor, July 7, 1886, 
 Professor A. S. Hardy, of Dartmouth, is 
 reported as saying : " Every educator now 
 recognizes the fact that individual charac- 
 teristics are always sufficiently marked to 
 demand his earliest attention ; and, fur- 
 thermore, that there is a stage in the 
 process of education where the choice, 
 the responsibility, and the freedom of 
 the individual should have a wide scope." 
 President Adams, in his inaugural ad- 
 dress at Cornell in 1885, asserted that 
 " there are varieties of gifts, call them, 
 if you will, fundamental differences, that 
 make it impossible to train successfully all 
 of a group of boys to the same standard. 
 These differences are partly matters of 
 sheer ability, and partly matters of taste ; 
 for if a boy has so great an aversion to a 
 given study that he can never be brought 
 to apply himself to it with some measure
 
 64 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 of fondness, he is as sure not to succeed in 
 it as he would be if he were lacking the 
 requisite mental capacity." 1 
 
 In determining, then, what the new edu- 
 cation may wisely be, let this be con- 
 sidered settled : it must contain a large 
 element of election. That is the opinion 
 
 1 These conditions of intellectual nourishment were 
 long ago recognized in other, less formal, departments of 
 mental training. In his essays on " Books and Reading " 
 President Porter wrote in 1871 : " The person who asks, 
 What shall I read ? or, With what shall I begin ? may 
 have read for years in a mechanical routine, and with a 
 listless spirit ; with scarcely an independent thought, 
 with no plans of self-improvement, and few aspirations 
 for self-culture. To all these classes the advice is full 
 of meaning : ' Read what will satisfy your wants and 
 appease your desires, and you will comply with the first 
 condition to reading with interest and profit.' Hun- 
 ger and thirst are better than manifold appliances and 
 directions, in respect to other than the bodily wants, 
 towards a good appetite and a healthy digestion. If 
 a man has any self-knowledge or any power of self- 
 direction, he is surely competent to ask himself what is 
 the subject or subjects in respect to which he stands 
 most in need of knowledge or excitement from books. 
 If he can answer this question, he has gone very far to- 
 wards answering the question, ' What book or books can 
 I read with satisfaction and profit ?'" (Ch. iv., p. 39 )
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 65 
 
 of these unbiased judges. They find 
 personal choice necessary for promoting 
 a wider range of topics in the college, a 
 greater zeal on the part of the student, and 
 more suitable relations between teacher 
 and pupil. With this judgment I, of 
 course, heartily agree, though I should 
 make more prominent the moral reason of 
 the facts. I should insist that a right 
 character and temper in the receiving 
 mind is always a prerequisite of worthy 
 study. But I misrepresent these gentle- 
 men if I allow their testimony to stop here. 
 They maintain that the elective principle 
 as thus far carried out, though valuable, is 
 still meagre and one-sided. They do not 
 think it will be found self-sufficing and ca- 
 pable of guarding its own working. They 
 see that it has dangers peculiar to itself, 
 and believe that to escape them it will re- 
 quire to be restricted and furnished with 
 supplemental influences. I believe so too. 
 Choice is important, but it is also impor- 
 tant that one should choose well. The 
 5
 
 66 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 individual is sacred, but only so far as he 
 is capable of recognizing the sacredness of 
 laws which he has had no part in making. 
 Unrestricted arbitrary choice is indistin- 
 guishable from chaos ; and undoubtedly 
 every method of training which avoids 
 mechanism and includes choice as a fac- 
 tor leaves a door open in the direction 
 of chaos. Infinite Wisdom left that door 
 open when man was created. To dangers 
 from this source I am fully alive. I totally 
 dissent from those advocates of the elec- 
 tive system who would identify it with a 
 laissez-faire policy. The cry that we must 
 let nature take care of itself is a familiar 
 one in trade, in art, in medicine, in social 
 relations, in the religious life, in education; 
 but in the long run it always proves inade- 
 quate. Man is a personal spirit, a director, 
 a being fitted to compare and to organize 
 forces, not to take them as they rise, like 
 a creature of nature. The future will cer- 
 tainly not tolerate an education less or- 
 ganic than that of the past; but just as
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 67 
 
 certainly will it demand that the organic 
 tie shall be a living one, one whose bond 
 may assist those whom it restricts to be- 
 . come spontaneous, forcible, and diverse. 
 If I am offered only the alternative of 
 absolutism or laissez-faire, I choose laissez- 
 faire. Out of chaotic nature beautiful 
 forms do continually come forth. But 
 absolutism kills in the cradle. It cannot 
 tolerate a life that is imperfect, and so it 
 stifles what it should nourish. 
 
 Up to this point my critics and I have 
 walked hand in hand. Henceforth we part 
 company. I shall not follow out all our 
 little divergences. My object from the 
 first has been to trace the line along which 
 education may now proceed. It must, it 
 seems, be a line including election ; but 
 election limited how? To disentangle an 
 answer to this vexed question, I pass by 
 the many points in which my critics have 
 shown that I am foolish, and the few 
 others in which I might show them so, 
 and turn to the fundamental issue between
 
 68 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 us, our judgment of what the supplemental 
 influences are which will render personal 
 initiative safe. Personal initiative is as- 
 sured. The authoritative utterances I have 
 just quoted show that it can never again 
 be expelled from American colleges. But 
 what checks are compatible with it ? Ac- 
 cepting choice, what treatment will render 
 it continually wiser ? Here differences of 
 judgment begin to appear, and here I had 
 hoped to receive light from my critics. 
 The question is one where co-operative ex- 
 perience is essential. But those who have 
 written against me seem hardly to have 
 realized its importance. They generally 
 confine themselves to showing how bad 
 my plans are, and merely hint at better 
 ones which they themselves might offer. 
 But what are these plans ? Wise ways of 
 training boys are of more consequence 
 than Harvard misdeeds. We want to hear 
 of a constructive policy which can take a 
 young man of nineteen and so train him in 
 self-direction that four years later he may
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 69 
 
 venture out alone into a perplexing, and 
 for the most part hostile, world. The 
 thing to be done is to teach boys how to 
 manage themselves. Admit that the Har- 
 vard discipline does not do this perfectly 
 at present ; what will do it better ? Here 
 we are at an educational crisis. We stand 
 with this aim of self-guidance in our hands. 
 What are we going to do with it ? It is 
 as dangerous as a bomb. But we cannot 
 drop it. It is too late to objurgate. It is 
 better to think calmly what possible modes 
 of treatment are still open. When rail- 
 roads were found dangerous, men did not 
 take to stage-coaches again ; they only 
 studied railroading the more. 
 
 Now in the mass of negative criticism 
 which the last year has produced I detect 
 three positive suggestions, three ways in 
 which it is thought limitation may be use- 
 fully applied to supplement the inevitable 
 personal initiative. These modes of limita- 
 tion, it is true, are not worked out with 
 any fulness of practical detail, as if their
 
 7O THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 advocates were convinced that the future 
 was with them. Rather they are thrown 
 out as hints of what might be desirable if 
 facts and the public would not interfere. 
 But as they seem to be the only conceiv- 
 able modes of restricting the elective prin- 
 ciple by any species of outside checkage, I 
 propose to devote the remainder of this 
 paper to an examination of their feasibility. 
 In a subsequent paper I shall indicate what 
 sort of corrective appears to me more likely 
 to prove congruous and lasting. 
 
 The first suggestion is that the elective 
 principle should be limited from beneath. 
 Universities and schools are to advance 
 their grade, so that finally the universities 
 will secure three or four years of purely 
 elective study, while the schools, in addi- 
 tion to their present labors, will take 
 charge of the studies formerly prescribed 
 by the college. The schools, in short, are 
 to become German Gymnasia, and the col- 
 leges to delay becoming universities until 
 this regeneration of the schools is accom-
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 7 1 
 
 plished. 1 A certain "sum of topics" is 
 said to be essential to the culture of the 
 man and the citizen. In the interest of 
 church and state, young minds must be 
 provided with certain "fact forms," with 
 a "common consciousness," a "common 
 
 1 In deference to certain writers I employ their 
 favorite term "university" in contrast with the term 
 " college," yet I must own I do not know what it means. 
 An old signification is clear. A university is an assem- 
 blage of schools, as our government is an assemblage of 
 States. In England, different corporations, giving sub- 
 stantially similar instruction, are brought together by a 
 common body which confers the degrees. In this coun- 
 try, a group of professional schools law, medicine, 
 theology, and science are associated through one gov- 
 erning body with the college proper, that is, with the 
 candidates for the B. A. degree. In this useful sense, 
 Tufts and Bowdoin are universities; Amherst and 
 Brown, colleges. But Germany, which has thrown so 
 many parts of the world into confusion, has introduced 
 exaltation and mystery here. A university now appears 
 to mean " a college as good as it can be," a stimulating 
 conception, but not a finished or precise one. I would 
 not disparage it. It is a term of aspiration, good to 
 conjure with. When we want to elevate men's ideas, 
 or to obtain their dollars, it is well to talk about cre- 
 ating a true university : just as it is wise to bid the 
 forward-reaching boy to become "a true gentleman."
 
 72 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 basis of humanism ." Important as personal 
 election is, to allow it to take place before 
 this common basis is laid is " to strike a 
 blow at the historic substance of civiliza- 
 tion." How extensive this common con- 
 sciousness is to be may be learned from 
 Professor Howison's remark that "lan- 
 guages, classical and modern ; mathe- 
 matics, in all its general conceptions, 
 thoroughly apprehended ; physics, acquired 
 in a similar manner, and the other natural 
 sciences, though with much less of detail ; 
 history and politics ; literature, especially 
 of the mother tongue, but, indispensably, 
 the masterpieces in other languages, par- 
 ticularly the classic ; philosophy, in the 
 thorough elements of psychology, logic, 
 metaphysics, and ethics, each historically 
 treated, and economics, in the history of ele- 
 mentary principles, must all enter into any 
 education that can claim to be liberal." 
 
 The practical objections to this mo- 
 narchical scheme are many. I call atten- 
 tion to three only.
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 73 
 
 In the first place, the argument on 
 which it is based proves too much. If 
 we suppose a common consciousness to 
 be a matter of such importance, and that 
 it cannot be secured except by sameness 
 of studies, then that State is criminally 
 careless which allows ninety-nine hun- 
 dredths of its members to get an individ- 
 ual consciousness by the simple expedient 
 of never entering college. The theory 
 seems to demand that every male and 
 why not female ? between sixteen and 
 twenty be indoctrinated in " the essential 
 subject matters," without regard to what 
 he or she may personally need to know 
 or do. This is the plan of religious teach- 
 ing adopted by the Romish Church, which 
 enforces its " fact forms " of doctrine on 
 all alike ; without securing, however, by 
 this means, according to the judgment of 
 the outside world, any special freshness 
 of religious life. I do not believe the re- 
 sults would be better in the higher secu- 
 lar culture, and I should be sorry to see
 
 74 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 Romish methods applied there ; but if 
 they are to be applied, let them fall im- 
 partially on all members of the commu- 
 nity. To put into swaddling clothes the 
 man who is wise enough to seek an edu- 
 cation, and to leave his duller brother to 
 kick about as he pleases, seems a little 
 arbitrary. 
 
 But secondly, there is no more prospect 
 of persuading our high schools to accept 
 the prescribed subjects of the colleges 
 than there is of persuading our govern- 
 ment to transform itself into the German. 
 Already the high schools and the colleges 
 are unhappily drawing apart. The only 
 hope of their nearer approach is in the 
 remission by the colleges of some of the 
 more burdensome subjects at present ex- 
 acted. Paid for by common taxation, 
 these schools are called on to equip the 
 common man for his daily struggle. That 
 they will one day devote themselves to lay- 
 ing the foundations of an ideally best edu- 
 cation for men of leisure is grotesquely
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 75 
 
 improbable. Although Harvard draws 
 rather more than one third of her stu- 
 dents from States outside New Eng- 
 .land, the whole number of students who 
 have come to her from the high schools 
 of these States, during a period of the 
 last ten years, is but sixty-six. Fitting 
 for college is becoming an alarmingly 
 technical matter, and is falling largely 
 into the hands of private tutors and 
 academies. 
 
 It may be said, however, thirdly, that 
 it is just these academies which might 
 advantageously take the present freshman 
 and sophomore studies. They would thus 
 become the exclusive avenues to the uni- 
 versity of the future, leaving it free to do 
 its own proper work with elective studies. 
 Considering the great expense which this 
 lengthening of the curriculum of the acad- 
 emy implies, it is plain that the number 
 of schools capable of fitting boys in this 
 way would always be small. These few 
 academies, with their monopoly of learned
 
 76 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 training, would lose their present character 
 and be erected into little colleges, col- 
 leges of a second grade. That any such 
 thing is likely to occur, I do not believe ; 
 but if it were, would it aid the higher edu- 
 cation and promote its wide dispersion ? 
 Precisely the contrary. Instead of going 
 to the university from these academies, 
 boys would content themselves with the 
 tolerable education already received. For 
 the most part they would decline to go 
 farther. It is useless to say that this 
 does not happen in Germany, where the 
 numbers resorting to the university are 
 so large as to have become the subject of 
 complaint ; for the German government, 
 controlling as it does all access to the 
 professions, is able to force through the 
 Gymnasia and through special courses at 
 the university a body of young men who 
 would otherwise be seeking their fortunes 
 elsewhere. Whether such control would 
 be desirable in this country, I will not 
 consider. Some questions are not feasi-
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 77 
 
 ble even for discussion. But it is to Eng- 
 lish experience we must look to see what 
 our case would be. The great public 
 schools of England Eton, Rugby, Har- 
 row, Winchester, Westminster, Chelten- 
 ham are of no higher order than under 
 the proposed plan Andover and Exeter 
 would become. From these two acade- 
 mies nearly ninety-five per cent of the 
 senior classes now enter some college. 
 But of the young men graduating from 
 the English schools named, so far as I 
 can ascertain, less than fifty per cent go 
 to the university. With the greater pres- 
 sure toward commercial life in this coun- 
 try, the number would certainly be less 
 than in England. To build up colleges 
 of a second grade, and to permit none but 
 those who have passed them to enter col- 
 leges of the first, is to cut off the higher 
 education from nearly all those who do 
 not belong to the privileged classes ; it is 
 to make the " common consciousness " less 
 common, and to turn it, even more effectu-
 
 /8 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 ally than at present, into the consciousness 
 of a clique. He who must make a living 
 for himself or for others cannot afford to 
 reach his profession late. The age of en- 
 tering college is already too high. With 
 improved methods of teaching I hope it 
 may be somewhat reduced. At any rate, 
 every study now added to the high schools 
 or academies is a fresh barrier between 
 education and the people. 
 
 If, then, by prescribing a large amount 
 of study outside the university the elective 
 principle is not likely to be successfully 
 limited, is it not probable that within 
 the college itself the two counter princi- 
 ples of election and prescription, mutually 
 limiting, mutually supporting, will always 
 be retained ? This is the second sug- 
 gestion ; to bring studies of choice and 
 studies commanded into juxtaposition. 
 The backbone of the college is to be 
 kept prescribed, the fleshy parts to be 
 made elective. By a special modification 
 of the plan, the later years are turned
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 79 
 
 largely, perhaps wholly, toward election, 
 and a line is drawn at the junior, or even 
 the sophomore year, below which elective 
 studies are forbidden to penetrate. Is 
 not this the plan that will finally be 
 judged safest? It certainly is the safest 
 for a certain number of years. Before it 
 can securely reach anything else, every 
 college must pass through this interme- 
 diate state. After half a century of test- 
 ing election, Harvard still retains some 
 prescribed studies. The Harvard juniors 
 chose for nineteen years before the sopho- 
 mores, and the sophomores seventeen years 
 before the freshmen. In introducing elec- 
 tives a sober pace is commendable. A 
 university is charged with the greatest of 
 public trusts. The intelligence of the 
 community is, to a large extent, in its 
 keeping. It is bound to keep away from 
 risky experiments, to disregard shifting 
 popular fancies, and to be as conserva- 
 tive as clearness of sight will permit. I 
 do not plead, therefore, that Harvard and
 
 80 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 Yale should abolish all prescription the 
 coming year. They certainly should not 
 In my opinion, most colleges are moving 
 too fast in the elective direction already. 
 I merely plead that we must see where 
 we are going. As public guides, we must 
 forecast the track of the future if we would 
 avoid stumbling into paths which lead 
 nowhere. That is all I am attempting 
 here. -I want to ascertain whether the 
 dual system of limitation is a stable sys- 
 tem, one in which we can put our trust, 
 or whether it is a temporary convenience, 
 likely to slip away a little year after year. 
 What does history say ? Let us examine 
 the facts of the past. The following table 
 shows at the left the fifteen New England 
 colleges. In the next three parallel col- 
 umns is printed the percentage of elective 
 studies which existed in these colleges in 
 1875-76; in the last three, the percentage 
 which exists to-day. To render the com- 
 parison more exact, I print the sophomore, 
 junior, and senior years separately, reserv-
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 8l 
 
 ing the problem of the freshman year for 
 later discussion. 1 
 
 / 
 
 1875-76. 
 
 1885-86. 
 
 Soph. 
 
 Jun. 
 
 Sen. 
 
 Soph. 
 
 Jun. 
 
 Sen. 
 
 Amherst . . 
 
 .04 
 
 .20 
 
 .08 
 
 .20 
 
 75 
 
 75 
 
 Bates . . . 
 
 
 
 O 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 Boston . . 
 
 
 
 O 
 
 
 
 35 
 
 .66 
 
 .82 
 
 Bowdoin . . 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 *5 
 
 .25 
 
 2 5 
 
 Brown . . 
 
 
 
 .04 
 
 .04 
 
 14 
 
 37 
 
 55 
 
 Colby . . . 
 
 o 
 
 O 
 
 
 
 
 
 .08 
 
 .10 
 
 Dartmouth . 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 .41 
 
 36 
 
 Harvard . . 
 
 .50 
 
 .78 
 
 I.OO 
 
 I.OO 
 
 I.OO 
 
 I.OO 
 
 Middlebury 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 Trinity . . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 2 5 
 
 .25 
 
 Tufts . . . 
 
 o 
 
 17 
 
 17 
 
 
 
 .28 
 
 43 
 
 Vermont . . 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 Wesleyan . 
 
 
 
 47 
 
 47 
 
 .16 
 
 47 
 
 .64 
 
 Williams 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 37 
 
 Yale . . . 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 13 
 
 53 
 
 .80 
 
 This table yields four conclusions : (i) A 
 rapid and fateful revolution is going on in 
 
 1 It is impossible to show in this table the range of 
 choice, that is, the number of studies between which a 
 man's selection lies. I wish I could warrant minute 
 accuracy in regard to the point which it professes to 
 show. Great pains have been spent upon it. Its state- 
 ments have been reported to me by an officer of the 
 college named, and this report has been subsequently 
 verified by catalogue. But only those who have had 
 much experience with statistics know how unveracious 
 figures can be. 
 
 6
 
 82 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 the higher education of New England. 
 We do not exaggerate the change when 
 we speak of an old education and a new. 
 (2) The spread of it is in tolerable propor- 
 tion to the wealth of the college concerned. 
 The new modes are expensive. It is not 
 disapproval which is holding the colleges 
 back ; it is inability to meet the cost. I 
 am sorry to point out this fact. To my 
 mind one of the gravest perplexities of the 
 new education is the query, What are the 
 small colleges to do ? They have a useful- 
 ness altogether peculiar ; yet from the life- 
 giving modern methods of training they 
 are of necessity largely cut off. (3) The 
 colleges which long ago foresaw their com- 
 ing necessities have been able to proceed 
 more cautiously than those which acknowl- 
 edged them late. (4) The movement is 
 one of steady advance. There is no going 
 back. It must be remembered, too, that 
 the stablest colleges have been proceeding 
 with these changes many more years than 
 the period shown in the table. Are we,
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 83 
 
 then, prepared to dismiss prejudice from 
 our minds and to recognize what steadiness 
 of advance means ? In other matters when 
 a general tendency in a given direction is 
 discovered, extending over a long series of 
 years, visible in individuals widely unlike, 
 and presenting no solitary case of back- 
 ward turning, we are apt to conclude that 
 there is a force in the movement which 
 will carry it still further onward. We are 
 not disposed to seize on some point in its 
 path and to count that an ultimate holding- 
 ground. This, I say, would be a natural 
 conclusion unless we could detect in the 
 movement tendencies at work in an op- 
 posite direction. Are there any such 
 tendencies here ? I cannot find them. 
 Prescription invariably loses ; election in- 
 variably gains. 
 
 But in order to make a rational predic- 
 tion about the future we must know more 
 than the bare facts of the past ; we need 
 to know why these particular facts have 
 arisen. What are the reasons that when-
 
 84 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 ever elective and prescribed studies are 
 mixed, an extrusive force regularly appears 
 in the elective ? The reasons are not far 
 to seek. Probably every professor in New 
 England understands them. The two sys- 
 tems are so incongruous that each brings 
 out the vices rather than the virtues of its 
 incompatible brother. Prescribed studies, 
 side by side with elective, appear a bond- 
 age ; elective, side by side with prescribed, 
 an indulgence. So long as all studies are 
 prescribed, one may be set above another 
 in the mind of the pupil on grounds of in- 
 trinsic worth ; let certain studies express 
 the pupil's wishes, and almost certainly 
 the remainder, valuable as they may be in 
 themselves, will express his disesteem. It 
 is useless to say this should not be so. It 
 always is. The zeal of work, the freshness 
 of interest, which now appear in the chosen 
 studies, are deducted from those which are 
 forced. On the latter as little labor as 
 possible is expended. They become per- 
 functory and mechanical, and soon restive
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 85 
 
 pupils and dissatisfied teachers call for fresh 
 extension of energizing choice. This is 
 why the younger officers in all the colleges 
 are eager to give increased scope to the 
 elective studies. They cannot any longer 
 get first-rate work done in the prescribed. 
 Alarmed by the dangers of the new prin- 
 ciple, as they often and justly are, they 
 find that the presence of prescription, in- 
 stead of diminishing the dangers, adds 
 another and a peculiarly enfeebling one to 
 those which existed before. So certain are 
 these dangers, and so inevitable the ex- 
 panding power of the elective principle, 
 that it is questionable whether it would 
 not be wise for a college to refuse to have 
 anything to do with elective studies so 
 soon as it knows itself too weak to allow 
 them to spread. 
 
 For where will this spreading stop ? It 
 cannot stop till the causes of it stop. The 
 table just given shows no likelihood of its 
 stopping at all, and a little reflection will 
 show that each enlargement increases the
 
 86 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 reasons for another enlargement still. If 
 prescribed studies are ever exceptional, in- 
 effective, and obnoxious, they certainly be- 
 come more so as they diminish in number. 
 A college which retains one of them is in 
 a condition of unstable equilibrium. But 
 is this true of the freshman year? Will 
 not a special class of considerations keep 
 prescription enduring and influential there, 
 long after it has lost its usefulness in the 
 later years ? A boy of nineteen comes from 
 home about as untrained in will as in in- 
 telligence. Will it not always be thought 
 best to give him a year in which to acquaint 
 himself with his surroundings and to learn 
 what studies he may afterwards profitably 
 select ? Possibly it will. I incline to think 
 not. The case of the freshman year is un- 
 doubtedly peculiar. Taking a large body 
 of colleges, we have direct evidence that 
 during their last three years the elective 
 principle steadily wins and never loses. 
 We have but a trifle of such evidence as 
 regards the freshman year. There the
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 8/ 
 
 struggle of the two forces has barely be- 
 gun. It has begun at Harvard, and the 
 usual result is already foreshadowed. The 
 prescribed studies are disparaged studies ; 
 they are not worked at the best advantage. 
 Still, I do not like to prophesy on evidence 
 so narrow. I will merely say I see no rea- 
 son to suppose that colleges will meet with 
 permanent success in mingling incompati- 
 ble kinds of study in their freshman year. 
 But I can only surmise. Let any college 
 that inclines to try the experiment do so. 
 
 It may be thought, however, a wiser 
 course to keep the freshman year un- 
 touched by choice. A solid year of pre- 
 scription is thus secured as a limitation 
 on the election that is to follow. This 
 plan is so often advised, especially by per- 
 sons unacquainted with the practical work- 
 ing of colleges, that it requires a brief 
 examination by itself. 
 
 Let us suppose the revolution which we 
 have traced in the sophomore, junior, and 
 senior years to have reached its natural ter-
 
 88 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 minus ; let us suppose that in these years 
 all studies have become elective, while the 
 freshman year remains completely pre- 
 scribed ; the college will then fall into two 
 parts, a preparatory department and a uni- 
 versity department. In these two depart- 
 ments the character of the instruction, the 
 methods of study, the consciousness of 
 the students, will be altogether dissimi- 
 lar. The freshmen will not be taken by 
 upper classmen as companions ; they will 
 be looked down upon as children. Hazing 
 will find abundant excuse. An abrupt line 
 will be drawn, on whose farther side free- 
 dom will lie, on whose hither side, bond- 
 age. The sophomore, a being who at best 
 has his peculiarities, will find his sense of 
 self-sufficiency doubled. Whatever badly- 
 bred boy parents incline to send to college 
 will seem to them safe enough for a year, 
 and they will suppose that during this 
 period he will learn how to behave. Of 
 course he will learn nothing of the sort. 
 Manly discipline has not yet begun. At
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 89 
 
 the end of the freshman year a boy will be 
 only so much less a boy as increase of age 
 may make him. Through being forced to 
 study mathematics this year there comes 
 no sustaining influence fitted to fortify 
 the judgment when one is called the next 
 year to choose between Greek and German. 
 On the contrary, the change from school 
 methods to maturing methods is rendered 
 as dangerous as possible by allowing it to 
 take place quite nakedly, by itself, unsup- 
 ported by other changes, and at the mere 
 dictation of the almanac. An emancipa- 
 tion so bare and sudden is not usual else- 
 where. For boys who do not go to college, 
 departure from home is commonly recog- 
 nized as a fit occasion for putting on that 
 dangerous garment, the toga virilis. En- 
 trance to the university constitutes a simi- 
 lar epoch, when change of residence, new 
 companions, altered conditions of living, a 
 realization that the old supports are gone, 
 and the presumption with which every 
 one now meets the youth that he is to be
 
 90 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 treated as a man among men, become help- 
 ful influences co-operating to ease the hard 
 and inevitable transition from parental con- 
 trol to personal self-direction. A safer time 
 for beginning individual responsibility can- 
 not be found. At any rate, whether my 
 diagnosis of reasons is correct or not, the 
 fact is clear, self-respecting colleges 
 do not tolerate preparatory departments. 
 They do not work well. They are an ele- 
 ment of weakness in the institution which 
 harbors them. Even where at first they 
 are judged necessary, so soon as the col- 
 lege grows strong they are dropped. When 
 we attempt to plan an education for times 
 to come, we must bear in mind established 
 facts. Turn the freshman year into a pre- 
 paratory department, fill it with studies 
 antithetic in aim, method, and spirit to those 
 of later years, and something is established 
 which no sober college ever permitted to 
 remain long within its borders. This is 
 the teaching of the past without an excep- 
 tion. To suppose the future will be dif-
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 91 
 
 ferent is but the blind hope of a timid 
 transitionalism. 
 
 The third suggestion for restricting elec- 
 .tion is the group system. This deserves a 
 more respectful treatment than the methods 
 hitherto discussed, for it is something more 
 than a suggestion : it is a system, a con- 
 structive plan of education, thought out 
 in all its parts, and directed toward an in- 
 tended end. The definition which I have 
 elsewhere offered of the elective system, 
 that it demands a fixed quantity and qual- 
 ity of study with variable topic, would be 
 applicable also to the group system. Ac- 
 cordingly it belongs to the new education 
 rather than to the old. No less than the 
 elective system it is opposed to the methods 
 of restriction thus far described. These 
 latter methods attempt to limit election by 
 the ballast of an alien principle lodged be- 
 neath it or by its side. They put a weight 
 of prescription into the preparatory schools, 
 into the early college years, or into parallel 
 lines of study extending throughout the
 
 92 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 college course. The source of their prac- 
 tical trouble lies here : the two princi- 
 ples, election and prescription, are nowhere 
 united ; they remain sundered and at war, 
 unserviceable for each other's defects. The 
 group system intertwines them. It per- 
 mits choice in everything, but at the same 
 time prescribes everything. This it effects 
 by enlarging the unit of choice and pre- 
 scribing its constituent factors. A group 
 or block of studies is offered for choice, not 
 a single study. All the studies of a group 
 must be taken if any are, the "if" being 
 the only matter left for the student to 
 settle. The group may include all the 
 studies open to a student at the univer- 
 sity. One decision may determine his 
 entire course. Or, as in the somewhat 
 analogous arrangement of the English uni- 
 versities, one group may be selected at the 
 beginning and another in the middle of the 
 university life. The group itself is some- 
 times contrived so as to allow an individual 
 variation ; different students read different
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 93 
 
 books ; a special phase of philosophy, his- 
 tory, or science receives prominence. But 
 the boundaries of the group cannot be 
 crossed. All the studies selected by the 
 college authorities to form a single group 
 must be taken ; no others can be. 
 
 In this method of limiting choice there is 
 much that is attractive. I feel that attrac- 
 tion strongly. Under the exceptional con- 
 ditions which exist at the Johns Hopkins 
 University, a group system has done excel- 
 lent work. Like all the rest of the world, 
 I honor that work and admire its wise di- 
 rectors. But group systems seem to me 
 to possess features too objectionable to 
 permit them to become the prevalent type 
 of the future, and I do not see how these 
 features can be removed without aban- 
 doning what is distinctive, and changing 
 the whole plan into the elective system, 
 pure and simple. The objectionable fea- 
 tures connect themselves with the size of 
 the unit of choice, with difficulties in the 
 construction of the groups, and with the
 
 94 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 attempt to enforce specialization. But 
 these are enigmatic phrases; let me ex- 
 plain them. 
 
 Obviously, for the young, foresight is a 
 hard matter. While disciplining them in 
 the intricate art of looking ahead, I should 
 think it wise to furnish frequently a means 
 of repairing errors. Penalties for bad 
 choices should not be too severe. Now 
 plainly the larger the unit of choice, the 
 graver the consequences of erroneous 
 judgment. The group system takes a 
 large unit, a body of studies ; the simple 
 elective system, a small unit, the single 
 study. Errors of choice are consequently 
 less reparable under the group system 
 than under pure election. To meet this 
 difficulty the college course at Baltimore 
 has been reduced from four years to three ; 
 but even so, a student who selects a group 
 for which he finds himself unfit cannot 
 bring himself into proper adjustment with- 
 out the loss of a year. If he does not dis- 
 cover his unfitness until the second year
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 95 
 
 has begun, he loses two years. Under the 
 elective system, the largest possible pen- 
 alty for a single mistake is the loss of a 
 single study, one quarter of a year's work. 
 This necessary difference in ease of repa- 
 rability appears to me to mark an infe- 
 riority in group systems, considered as 
 methods of educating choice. To the 
 public it may seem otherwise. I am often 
 astonished to find people approving irrepa- 
 rable choices and condemning reparable 
 ones. That youths between nineteen and 
 twenty-three should select studies for 
 themselves shocks many people who look 
 kindly enough on marriages contracted 
 during those years. Boys still unbearded 
 have a large share in deciding whether 
 they will go to college, to a scientific 
 school, to a store, to sea, or to a cattle- 
 ranch. Their lives are staked on the 
 wisdom of the step taken. Yet the Amer- 
 ican mode of meeting these family prob- 
 lems seems to our community, on the 
 whole, safer than the English way of reg-
 
 96 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 ulating them by tradition and dictation. 
 The choice with heavy stakes of the boy 
 who does not go to college is frequently 
 set off favorably against the choices with 
 light stakes of the boy who goes. Perhaps 
 a similarly lenient judgment will in the 
 long run be passed on the great stakes 
 involved in group systems. I doubt it. 
 I think it will ultimately be judged less 
 dangerous and more maturing to grant 
 a young man, in his passage through a 
 period of moral discipline, frequent oppor- 
 tunities of repair. 
 
 Again, the practical difficulties of decid- 
 ing what groups shall be formed are enor- 
 mous. What studies shall enter into 
 each ? How many groups shall there be ? 
 If but one, we have the old-fashioned 
 college with no election. If two, we have 
 the plan which Yale has just abandoned, 
 a fixed undergraduate department main- 
 tained in parallel vigor with a fixed scien- 
 tific school. But in conceding the claims 
 of variety even to this degree, we have
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 97 
 
 treated the fundamental differences be- 
 tween man and man as worthy, not repre- 
 hensible ; and can we say that the proper 
 .differences are only two ? Must we not 
 acknowledge a world at least as complex 
 as that they have in Baltimore, where 
 there appear to be seven reputable species 
 of mankind: "Those who wish a good 
 classical training ; those who look toward 
 a course in medicine; those who prefer 
 mathematical studies with reference to 
 engineering, astronomy, and teaching ; 
 those who wish an education in scientific 
 studies, not having chosen a specialty; 
 those who expect to pursue a course in 
 theology ; those who propose to study law ; 
 those who wish a literary training not 
 rigidly classical." l Here a classification 
 of human wishes is attempted, but one 
 suspects that there are legitimate wishes 
 which lie outside the scheme. It does not, 
 for example, at once appear why a pro- 
 spective chemist should be debarred from 
 
 1 Andover Review, June, 1886, p. 572. 
 7
 
 98 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 all regular study of mathematics. It seems 
 hard that a youth of literary tastes should 
 be cut off from Greek at entrance unless 
 he will agree to take five exercises in it 
 each week throughout his college course. 
 One does not feel quite easy in allowing 
 nobody but a lawyer or a devotee of mod- 
 ern languages to read a page of English or 
 American history. 1 The Johns Hopkins 
 programme is the most ingenious and the 
 most flexible contrivance for working a 
 group system that I have ever seen. For 
 this reason I mention it as the most favor- 
 able type of all. Considering its purposes, 
 I do not believe it can be much improved. 
 As applied to its little band of students 
 116 it certainly works few hardships. 
 Yet all the exclusions I have named, and 
 many more besides, appear in it. I in- 
 stance these simply to show what barriers 
 to knowledge the best group system erects. 
 Remove these, and others quite as great 
 
 1 See the Johns Hopkins University Register, pp. 
 47-53-
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 99 
 
 are introduced. Try to avoid them by 
 allowing the student of one group to take 
 certain studies in another, and the sole 
 line which parts the group system from 
 the elective is abandoned. In practice, 
 it usually is abandoned. Confronted with 
 the exigencies of operation, the so-called 
 group system turns into an elective sys- 
 tem, with highly specialized lines of study 
 strongly recommended. With this more 
 genial working I have nothing now to do. 
 My point is this : a system of hard and 
 fast groups presents difficulties of con- 
 struction and maintenance too great to 
 recommend it to the average college of the 
 future as the best mode of limiting the 
 elective principle. 1 
 
 Probably, however, this difficulty will 
 
 1 I am assured that at the Johns Hopkins University 
 a student is usually allowed to drop a course in his reg- 
 ular group of studies and to substitute another of equal 
 difficulty taken from some other group. No doubt 
 this indulgence, as well as the privilege of taking extra 
 studies, does much to mitigate the normal severity of a 
 group system.
 
 100 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 chiefly be felt by persons engaged in the 
 actual work of educational organization. 
 The outer public will think it a more 
 serious objection that grouped colleges are 
 in reality professional schools carried down 
 to the limits of boyhood. So far as they 
 hold by their groups, they are nurseries of 
 specialization. That this is necessarily so 
 may not at first be apparent. A little con- 
 sideration of the contrast in aim between 
 group systems and prescribed will make 
 the matter plain. Prescribed systems have 
 gained their long hold on popular confi- 
 dence by aiming at harmonious culture. 
 They argue, justly enough, that each sepa- 
 rate sort of knowledge furnishes something 
 of its own to the making of a man. This 
 particular " something," they say, can be 
 had from no other source. The sum of 
 these " somethings " constitutes a rounded 
 whole. The man who has not experienced 
 each of them in some degree, however 
 small, is imperfectly planned. One who 
 has been touched by all has laid the foun-
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. IOI 
 
 dations of a liberal education. Degree of 
 acquaintance with this subject or with that 
 may subsequently enlarge. Scholarly in- 
 terest may concentrate. But at the first, 
 the proper aim is balanced knowledge, 
 harmonious development of all essential 
 powers, avoidance of one-sidedness. 
 
 On this aim the group system bestows 
 but a secondary attention. Regarding 
 primarily studies, not men, it attempts to 
 organize single connected departments of 
 knowledge. Accordingly it permits only 
 those studies to be pursued together which 
 immediately cohere. It lays out five, ten, 
 any number of paths through the field of 
 knowledge, and to one of these paths the 
 pilgrim is confined. Each group consti- 
 tutes a specialty, a specialty intensified in 
 character as, in order to escape the difficul- 
 ties of maintenance just pointed out, the 
 number of groups is allowed to increase. 
 By insistence on specialization regard for 
 general culture is driven into a subordinate 
 place. The advocates of prescription main-
 
 102 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 tain that there are not half a dozen ground- 
 plans of perfected humanity. They say 
 there is but one. If we introduce variety 
 of design into a curriculum, we neglect that 
 ideal man who resides alike in all. We 
 trust, on the contrary, in our power to hit 
 some line of study which may deservedly 
 appeal to one human being while not so 
 appealing to another. We simply note 
 the studies which are most congruous 
 with the special line selected, and by this 
 congruity we shape our group. In the 
 new aim, congruity of studies takes pre- 
 cedence of harmonious development of 
 powers. 
 
 I have no doubt that specialization is 
 destined to become more marked in the 
 American education of the future. It 
 must become so if we are to produce the 
 strong departmental scholars who illumi- 
 nate learning in other countries ; indeed, 
 it must become so if we are to train com- 
 petent experts for the affairs of daily life. 
 The popular distrust of specializing is sure
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 03 
 
 to grow less as our people become familiar 
 with its effects and see how often narrow 
 and thorough study, undertaken in early 
 life, leads to ultimate breadth. It is a 
 pretty dream that a man may start broad 
 and then concentrate, but nine out of 
 every ten strong men have taken the op- 
 posite course. They have begun in some 
 one-sided way, and have added other sides 
 as occasion required. Almost in his teens 
 Shakespeare makes a specialty of the 
 theatre, Napoleon of military science, 
 Beethoven of music, Hunter of medi- 
 cine, Hugh Miller of rocks, Faraday of 
 chemistry, Hamilton of political science. 
 The great body of painters, musicians, 
 poets, novelists, theologians, politicians, 
 are early specialists. In fact, self-made 
 men are generally specialists. Something 
 has aroused an interest, and they have 
 followed it out until they have surveyed 
 a wide horizon from a single point of 
 view. In offering wider opportunities for 
 specialization, colleges have merely been
 
 IO4 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 assimilating their own modes of training 
 to those which prevail in the world at 
 large. 
 
 It does not, therefore, seem to me ob- 
 jectionable that group systems set a high 
 value on specialization. That is what 
 every man does, and every clear-eyed col- 
 lege must do it too. What I object to is 
 that group systems, so far as they ad- 
 here to their aim, enforce specialization. 
 Among every half dozen students, proba- 
 bly one will be injured if he cannot spe- 
 cialize largely ; two or three more might 
 wisely specialize in lower degree ; but to 
 force the remaining two or three into 
 curricula shaped by professional bias is 
 to do them serious damage. There are 
 sober boys of little intrepidity or positive 
 taste, boys who properly enough wish to 
 know what others know. They will not 
 make scholars. They were not born to 
 enlarge the boundaries of knowledge. 
 They have another function : they pre- 
 serve and distribute such knowledge as
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 105 
 
 already exists. Many of them are persons 
 of wealth. To furnish them glimpses of 
 varied learning is to save them from bar- 
 barism. Still another large class is com- 
 posed of boys who develop late. They are 
 boys who will one day acquire an interest 
 of their own, if they are allowed to roam 
 about somewhat aimlessly in the domain of 
 wisdom until they are twenty-one. Both 
 of these classes have their rights. The 
 prescribed system was built to support 
 them ; the elective shelters and improves 
 them ; but a group system shuts them all 
 out, if they will not on leaving school 
 adopt professional courses. Whenever I 
 can hear of a group system which like the 
 old college has a place for the indistinct 
 young man, and like the new elective col- 
 lege matures him annually by suggesting 
 that he take part in shaping his own 
 career, I will accept the group system. 
 Then, too, the public will probably ac- 
 cept it. Until then, rigid groups will be 
 thought by many to lay too great a strain
 
 106 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 on unseasoned powers of choice, to present 
 too many practical difficulties of construc- 
 tion, and to show too doctrinaire a confi- 
 dence that every youth will fit without 
 pinching into a specialized class.
 
 POSSIBLE LIMITATIONS OF THE 
 ELECTIVE SYSTEM. 
 
 II. 
 
 r I^HE preceding paper has sufficiently 
 * discussed the impossible limitations 
 of the elective system, and has shown with 
 some minuteness the grounds of their im- 
 possibility. The methods there examined 
 are the only ones suggested by my critics. 
 They all agree in this, that they seek to 
 narrow the scope of choice. They try 
 to combine with it a hostile factor, and 
 they differ merely in their mode of com- 
 bination. The first puts a restraining 
 check before election ; the second puts 
 one by its side ; the third makes the two 
 inseparable by allowing nothing to be 
 chosen which is not first prescribed. The 
 general purpose of all these methods is
 
 108 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 mine also. Election must be limited. Un- 
 chartered choice is licentious and self- 
 destructive. I quarrel with them only 
 because the modes of effecting their pur- 
 pose tend to produce results of a transient 
 and inappropriate sort. The aim of edu- 
 cation, as I conceive it, is to spiritualize 
 the largest possible number of persons, 
 that is, to teach them how to do their own 
 thinking and willing and to do it well. 
 But these methods effect something widely 
 different. They either aristocratize where 
 they should democratize, or they belittle 
 where they should mature, or else they 
 professionalize where they should human- 
 ize. A common trouble besets them 
 all : the limiting authority is placed in 
 external and arbitrary juxtaposition to 
 the personal initiative which it professes 
 to support. It should grow out of this 
 initiative and be its interpreter and reali- 
 zation. By limitation of choice the pro- 
 posers of these schemes appear to mean 
 making choice less. I mean fortifying it,
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 09 
 
 keeping it true to itself, making it more. 
 Control that diminishes the quantity of 
 choice is one thing ; control that raises 
 the quality, quite another. How impor- 
 tant is this distinction and how frequently 
 it is forgotten ! Words like " limitation," 
 "control," "authority," "obedience," are 
 words of majesty, but words also of doubt- 
 ful import. They carry a freight of wisdom 
 or of folly, according to the end towards 
 which they steer. In order to sanction 
 or discard limitations which induce obe- 
 dience, we must bear that end in mind. 
 Let us stop a moment, and see that we 
 have it in mind now. 
 
 Old educational systems are often said 
 to have erred by excess of authority. I 
 could not say so. The elective system, if 
 it is to possess the future, must become as 
 authoritative as they. More accurately 
 we say that their authority was of a 
 wrong sort. A father may exercise an 
 authority over his child no less directive 
 than that of the master over the slave ;
 
 1 10 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 but the father is trying to accomplish 
 something which the master disregards ; 
 the father hopes to make the will of an- 
 other strong, the master to make it weak ; 
 the father commands what the child him- 
 self would wish, had he sufficient experi- 
 ence. The child's obedience accordingly 
 enlightens, steadies, invigorates his inde- 
 pendent will. Invigoration is the purpose 
 of the command. The authority is akin 
 secretly akin to the child's own desires. 
 No alien power intervenes, as when a slave 
 obeys. Here a foreign will thwarts the 
 slave's proper motions. Over against his 
 own legitimate desires, the desire of a 
 totally different being appears and claims 
 precedence. Obedience like this brings 
 no ennoblement. The oftener a child 
 obeys, the less of a child is he ; the 
 oftener a slave, the more completely he 
 is a slave. Roughly to say, then, that 
 submission to authority is healthy for a 
 college boy, argues a mental confusion. 
 There are two kinds of authority, the
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. Ill 
 
 authority of moral guidance, and the au- 
 thority of repressive control : parental 
 authority, respecting and vivifying the 
 individual life and thus continually tend- 
 ing to supersede itself ; and masterly au- 
 thority, whose command, out of relation 
 to the obeyer's wish, tends ever to bring 
 the obedient into bondage. Which shall 
 college authority be ? Authority is neces- 
 sary, ever-present authority. If the young 
 man's choice is to become a thing of worth, 
 it must be encompassed with limitations. 
 But as the need of these limitations springs 
 from the imperfections of choice, so should 
 their aim be to perfect choice, not to re- 
 press it. To impose limitations which do 
 not ultimately enlarge the youth they bind 
 is to make the means of education "oblige 
 against its main end." 
 
 This moral authority is what the new 
 education seeks. To a casual eye, the 
 colleges of to-day seem to be growing 
 disorganized ; a closer view shows con- 
 struction taking place, but taking place
 
 112 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 along the lines of the vital distinction just 
 pointed out. Men are striving to bring 
 about a germane and ethical authority in 
 the room of the baser mechanical authori- 
 ties of the past. In this distinction, then, 
 a clew is to be found which, if followed up, 
 will lead us away from impossible limita- 
 tions of the elective system, and conduct 
 us at length to the possible, nay, to the 
 inevitable ones. As the elective princi- 
 ple is essentially ethical, its limitations, if 
 helpfully congruous, must be ethical too. 
 They must be simply the means of bring- 
 ing home to the young chooser the sacred 
 conditions of choice ; which conditions, if 
 I rightly understand them, may compactly 
 be entitled those of intentionality, infor- 
 mation, and persistence. To secure these 
 conditions, limitations exist. In the very 
 nature of choice, such conditions are im- 
 plied. Choice is sound as they prevail, 
 whimsical as they diminish. An educa- 
 tion which lays stress on the elective 
 principle is bound to lay stress on these
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 113 
 
 conditions also. It cannot slip over into 
 lazy ways of letting its students drift, and 
 still look for credit as an elective system. 
 People will distrust it. That is why they 
 distrust Harvard to-day. The objections 
 brought against the elective system of Har- 
 vard are in reality not levelled against the 
 elective system at all. They are directed 
 against its bastard brother, laissez-faire. 
 Objectors suspect that the conditions of 
 choice which I have named are not ful- 
 filled. They are not fulfilled, I confess, 
 or rather I stoutly maintain. To come 
 anywhere near fulfilling them requires 
 long time and study, and action unim- 
 peded by a misconceiving community. 
 Both time and study Harvard has given, 
 has given largely. The records of scholar- 
 ship and deportment which I exhibited in 
 my first paper show in how high a degree 
 Harvard has already been able to remove 
 from choice the capricious, ignorant, and 
 unsteadfast characteristics which rightly 
 bring it into disrepute. But much re-
 
 114 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 mains to do, and in that doing we are 
 hampered by the fact that a portion of the 
 public is still looking in wrong directions. 
 It cannot get over its hankering after the 
 delusive modes of limitation which I have 
 discussed. It does not persistently see 
 that at present the proper work of educa- 
 tion is the study of means by which self- 
 direction may be rendered safe. Leaders 
 of education themselves see this but dimly, 
 as the papers of my critics na'fvely show. 
 Until choice was frankly accepted as the 
 fit basis for the direction of a person by a 
 person, its fortifying limitations could not 
 be studied. Now they must be studied, 
 now that the old methods of autocratic 
 control are breaking down. As a moral 
 will comes to be recognized as the best 
 sort of steam power, the modes of gener- 
 ating that power acquire new claims to 
 attention. Henceforth the training of the 
 will must be undertaken by the elec- 
 tive system as an integral part of its 
 discipline.
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 115 
 
 I am not so presumptuous as to attempt 
 to prophesy the precise forms which meth- 
 ods of moral guidance will take. Moral 
 guidance is a delicate affair. Its spirit is 
 more important than its procedure. Flexi- 
 bility is its strength. Methods final, rigid, 
 and minute do not belong to it. Nor can 
 it afford to forget the one great truth of 
 laissez-faire, that wills which are to be 
 kept fresh and vigorous will not bear 
 much looking after. Time, too, is an im- 
 portant factor in the shaping of moral 
 influences. Experiments now in progress 
 at Harvard and elsewhere must discrimi- 
 nate safe from unsafe limitations. Leaving 
 then to the future the task of showing how 
 wide the scope of maturing discipline may 
 become, I will merely try to sketch the 
 main lines along which experiments are 
 now proceeding, I will give a few illustra- 
 tive examples of what is being done and 
 why, and I will state somewhat at large 
 how, in my judgment, more is yet to be 
 accomplished. To make the matter clear,
 
 Il6 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 a free exposition shall be given of the 
 puzzling headings already named ; that is, 
 I will first ramblingly discuss the limita- 
 tions on choice which may deepen the 
 student's intentionality of aim ; secondly, 
 those which increase his information in 
 regard to means ; and thirdly, those which 
 may strengthen his persistence in a course 
 once chosen. 
 
 I. That intentionality should be culti- 
 vated, I need not spend many words in 
 explaining. Everybody acknowledges that 
 without a certain degree of it choice is 
 impossible. Many persons assert also that 
 boys come to college with no clear inten- 
 tions, not knowing what they want, wait- 
 ing to be told ; for such, it is said, an 
 elective system is manifestly absurd. I 
 admit the fact. It is true. The majority 
 of the freshmen whom I have known in 
 the last seventeen years have been, at 
 entrance, deficient in serious aims. But 
 from this fact I draw a conclusion quite 
 opposite to the one suggested. It is elec-
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. II? 
 
 tion, systematized election, which these 
 boys need ; for when we say a young stu- 
 dent has no definite aims, we imply that 
 he has never become sufficiently interested 
 in any given intellectual line to have ac- 
 quired the wish to follow that line farther. 
 Such a state of things is lamentable, and 
 certainly shows that prescribed methods 
 the proper methods, in my judgment, 
 for the school years have proved in- 
 adequate. It is useless to continue them 
 into years confessedly less suited to their 
 exercise. Perhaps it is about equally use- 
 less to abandon the ill-formed boy to un- 
 guided choice. Prescription says, " This 
 person is unfit to choose, keep him so ; " 
 laissez-faire says, " If he is unfit to choose, 
 let him perish ; " but a watchful elective 
 system must say, " Granting him to be 
 unfit, if he is not spoiled, I will fit him." 
 And can we fit him ? I know well enough 
 that indifferent teachers incline to shirk 
 the task. They like to divide pupils into 
 the deceptive classes of good and bad,
 
 118 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 meaning by the former those who intend 
 to work, and by the latter those who intend 
 not to. But we must get rid of indifferent 
 teachers. Teachers with enthusiasm in 
 them soon discover that the two classes 
 of pupils I have named may as well be 
 dismissed from consideration. Where aims 
 have become definite, a teacher has little 
 more to do. The boy who means to work 
 will get learning under the poorest teacher 
 and the worst system ; while the boy who 
 means not to work may be forced up to 
 the Pierian spring, but will hardly be made 
 to drink. A vigorous teacher does not 
 assume intention to be ready-made. He 
 counts it his continual office to help in 
 making it. On the middle two quarters 
 of a class he spends his hardest efforts, 
 on students who are friendly to learning 
 but not impassioned for it, on those who 
 like the results of study but like tennis 
 also, and popularity, and cigars, and slack- 
 ness. The culture of these weak wills is 
 the problem of every college. Here are
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 1 19 
 
 unintentional boys waiting to be turned 
 into intentional men. What limitations on 
 intellectual and moral vagrancy will help 
 -them forward ? 
 
 The chief limitation, the one underlying 
 all others, the one which no clever con- 
 trivance can ever supersede, is vitalized 
 teaching. Suitable subjects, attractively 
 taught, awake lethargic intention as noth- 
 ing else can. An elective system, as 
 even its enemies confess, enormously stimu- 
 lates the zeal of teachers. It consequently 
 brings to bear on unawakened boys influ- 
 ences of a strangely quickening character. 
 When I hear a man trained under the old 
 methods of prescription say, " At the time 
 I was in college I could not have chosen 
 studies for myself, and I do not believe my 
 son can," I see, and am not surprised to see, 
 that he does not understand what forces 
 the elective system sets astir. So power- 
 ful an influence have these forces over 
 both teachers and pupils, that questions 
 of hard and easy studies do not, as out-
 
 120 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 siders are apt to suppose, seriously disturb 
 the formation of sound intentions. The 
 many leaders in education whose opinions 
 on election I quoted in my previous paper 
 agree that the new modes tend to sobriety 
 and intentionality of aim. When Profes- 
 sor Ladd speaks of "the unexpected wis- 
 dom and manliness of the choices already 
 made " in the first year of election at New 
 Haven, he well expresses the gratified sur- 
 prise which every one experiences on per- 
 ceiving in the very constitution of the 
 elective system a sort of limitation on way- 
 ward choice. This limitation seems to me, 
 as Professor Ladd says he found it, 1 a tol- 
 erable preventive of choices directly aimed 
 at ease. In a community devoted to ath- 
 letics, base ball is not played because it is 
 " soft," and foot-ball avoided on account of 
 
 1 " Doubtless some have carried out the intention of 
 making everything as soft as possible for themselves. 
 But the choices, in fact, do not as yet show the exist- 
 ence of any such intention in any considerable number 
 of cases ; they show rather the very reverse." Profes- 
 sor Ladd in The New Englander, January, 1885, p. 119.
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 121 
 
 its difficulty. A similar state of things 
 must be brought about in studies. In 
 a certain low degree it has come about 
 already. As election breeds new life in 
 teaching, the old slovenly habit of liking 
 best what costs least begins to disappear. 
 Easy courses will exist and ought to exist. 
 Prescribed colleges, it is often forgotten, 
 have more of them than elective colleges. 
 The important matter is, to see that they 
 fall to the right persons. Where every- 
 thing is prescribed, students who do not 
 wish easy studies are still obliged to take 
 them. Under election, soft courses may 
 often be pursued with advantage. A stu- 
 dent whose other courses largely depend 
 for their profit on the amount of private 
 reading or of laboratory practice accom- 
 plished in connection with them is wise 
 in choosing one or more in which the bulk 
 of the work is taken by the teacher. I 
 do not say that soft courses are always 
 selected with these wise aims in view. 
 Many I know are not. We have our proper
 
 122 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 share of hardened loafers "tares in our 
 sustaining corn " who have an unerring 
 instinct as to where they can most safely 
 settle. But large numbers of the men in 
 soft courses are there to good purpose ; and 
 I maintain that the superficial study of a 
 subject, acquainting one with broad out- 
 lines, is not necessarily a worthless study. 
 At Harvard to-day I believe we have too 
 few such superficial courses. As I look 
 over the Elective Pamphlet, and note the 
 necessarily varying degrees of difficulty in 
 the studies announced there, I count but 
 six which can, with any justice, be entitled 
 soft courses ; and several of these must be 
 reckoned by anybody an inspiration to the 
 students who pursue them. There is a 
 tendency in the elective system, as I have 
 shown elsewhere, to reduce the number of 
 soft courses somewhat below the desirable 
 number. 
 
 I insist, therefore, that under a pretty 
 loose elective system boys are little dis- 
 posed to intentionally vicious choices.
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 123 
 
 My fears look in a different direction. I 
 do not expect depravity, but I want to 
 head off aimless trifling. I agree with 
 the opponents of election in thinking that 
 there is danger, especially during the early 
 years of college life, that righteous inten- 
 tion may not be distinct and energetic. 
 Boys drift. Inadequate influences induce 
 their decisions. The inclinations of the 
 clique in which a young man finds himself 
 are, without much thought, accepted as his 
 own. Heedlessness is the young man's 
 bane. It should not be mistaken for vice ; 
 the two are different. A boy who will 
 enter a dormitory at twelve o'clock at 
 night, and go to the third story whistling 
 and beating time on the banisters, cer- 
 tainly seems a brutish person ; but he is 
 ordinarily a kind enough fellow, capable of 
 a good deal of self-sacrifice when brought 
 face to face with need. He simply does 
 not think. So it is in study : there, too, 
 he does not think. Now in college a boy 
 should learn perpetually to think ; and an
 
 124 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 excellent way of helping him to learn is to 
 ask him often what he is thinking about. 
 The object of the questioning should not 
 be to thwart the boy's aims, rather to in- 
 sure that they are in reality his own. Es- 
 sentially his to the last they should remain, 
 even though intrinsically they may not 
 be the best. Young persons, much more 
 than their elders, require to talk over plans 
 from time to time with an experienced 
 critic, in order to learn by degrees the 
 difficult art of planning. By such talk 
 intentionality is fortified. There is much 
 of this talk already ; talk of younger stu- 
 dents with older, talk with wise persons at 
 home, and more and more every year with 
 the teachers of the courses left and the 
 courses entered. All this is good. Hap- 
 hazard modes breed an astonishing aver- 
 age of choices that possess a meaning. 
 The waste of a laissez-faire system comes 
 nowhere near the waste of a prescribed. 
 But what is good when compared with a 
 bad thing may be poor when compared
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 125 
 
 with excellence itself. We must go on. 
 A college, like a man, should always be 
 saying, "Never was I so good as to-day, 
 and never again will I be so bad." We 
 must welcome criticisms more than praises, 
 and seek after our weak points as after hid 
 treasures. The elective system seems to 
 me weak at present through lacking organ- 
 ized means of bringing the student and his 
 intentions face to face. Intentions grow 
 by being looked at. At the English uni- 
 versities a young man on entering a col- 
 lege is put in charge of a special tutor, 
 without whose consent he can do little 
 either in the way of study or of personal 
 management. 1 Dependence so extreme is 
 perhaps better suited to an infant school 
 than to an American college ; and even in 
 England, where respectful subservience on 
 the part of the young has been cultivated 
 
 1 As the minute personal care given to individual stu- 
 dents in the English universities is often and deservedly 
 praised, I may as well say that it costs something. Ox- 
 ford spends each year about $2,000,000 on 2,500 men; 
 Harvard, $650,000 on 1,700.
 
 126 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 for generations, the system is losing ground. 
 Since the tutors were allowed to marry 
 and to leave the college home, tutorial 
 influence has been changing. In most 
 American colleges twenty-five years ago 
 there were officers known as class tutors, 
 to whom, in case of need, a student might 
 turn. Petty permissions were received 
 from these men, instead of from a mechan- 
 ical central office. So far as this plan set 
 personal supervision in the place of routine 
 it was, in my eyes, good. But the relation 
 of a class tutor to his boys was usually one 
 of more awe than friendship. At the Johns 
 Hopkins University there is a board of ad- 
 visers, to some member of which each stu- 
 dent is assigned at entrance. The adviser 
 stands in loco parentis to his charges. 
 The value of such adjustments depends on 
 the nature of the parental tie. If the rela- 
 tion is worked so as to stimulate the stu- 
 dent's independence, it is good ; if so as to 
 discharge him from responsibility, it unfits 
 for the life that follows. At Harvard
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. I2/ 
 
 special students not candidates for a de- 
 gree have recently been put in charge of a 
 committee, to whom they are obliged to re- 
 port their previous history and their plans 
 of study for each succeeding year. The 
 committee must know at all times what 
 their charges are doing. Something of 
 this sort, I am convinced, will be de- 
 manded at no distant day, as a means of 
 steadying all students in elective colleges. 
 Large personal supervision need not mean 
 diminution of freedom. A young man 
 may possess his freedom more solidly if he 
 recognizes an obligation to state and de- 
 fend the reasons which induce his choice. 
 For myself, I should be willing to make 
 the functions of such advisory committees 
 somewhat broad. As a college grows, the 
 old ways of bringing about acquaintance 
 between officers and students become im- 
 practicable. But the need of personal 
 acquaintance, unhappily, does not cease. 
 New ways should be provided. A boy 
 dropped into the middle of a large college
 
 128 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 must not be lost to sight ; he must be 
 looked after. To allow the teacher's work 
 of instruction to become divorced from his 
 pastoral, his priestly, function is to cheapen 
 and externalize education. I would have 
 every student in college supplied with 
 somebody who might serve as a discre- 
 tionary friend : and I should not think it a 
 disadvantage that such an expectation of 
 friendship would be as apt to better the 
 instructor as the student. 
 
 Before leaving this part of my subject, 
 I may mention a subordinate, but still 
 valuable, means of limiting choice so as to 
 increase its intentionality. The studies 
 open to choice in the early years should 
 be few and elementary. The significance 
 of advanced courses cannot be understood 
 till elementary ones are mastered, and 
 immature choice should not be confused 
 by many issues. At Harvard this mode 
 of limitation is largely employed. Al- 
 though the elective list for 1886-87 shows 
 172 courses, a freshman has hardly more
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. I2Q 
 
 than one eighth of these to choose from ; 
 in any given case this number will proba- 
 bly be reduced about one half by insuffi- 
 cient preparation or conflict of hours. 
 Seemingly about a third of the list is 
 offered to the average sophomore ; but 
 this amount is again cut down nearly one 
 half by the operation of similar causes. 
 The practice of hedging electives with 
 qualifications is a growing one. It may 
 well grow more. It offers guidance pre- 
 cisely at the point where it is most needed. 
 It protects rational choice, and guards 
 against many of the dangers which the 
 foes of election justly dread. 
 
 II. A second class of limitations of the 
 elective system, possible and friendly, 
 springs from the need of furnishing the 
 young elector ample information about 
 that which he is to choose. The best in- 
 tentions require judicious aim. If studies 
 are taken in the dark, without right antici- 
 pation of their subject-matter, or in igno- 
 rance of their relation to other studies, 
 9
 
 130 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 small results follow. Here, I think it will 
 be generally agreed, prescribed systems 
 are especially weak. Their pupils have 
 little knowledge beforehand of what a 
 course is designed to accomplish. Work 
 is undertaken blindly, minds consenting 
 as little as wills. An elective system is 
 impossible under such conditions. Its 
 student must know when he chooses, 
 what he chooses. He must be able to 
 estimate whether the choice of Greek 5 
 will further his designs better than the 
 choice of Greek 8. 
 
 At Harvard, methods of furnishing infor- 
 mation are pretty fully developed. In May 
 an elective pamphlet is issued, which an- 
 nounces everything that is to be taught 
 in the college during the following year. 
 Most departments, also, issue additional 
 pamphlets, describing with much detail 
 the nature of their special courses, and 
 the considerations which should lead a 
 student to one rather than another. If 
 the courses of a department are arranged
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 131 
 
 properly, pursuing one gives the most 
 needful knowledge about the available 
 next. This knowledge is generally sup- 
 plemented at the close of the year by 
 explanations on the part of the instructor 
 about the courses that follow. In the Elec- 
 tive Pamphlet a star, prefixed to courses 
 of an advanced and especially technical 
 character, indicates that the instructor 
 must be privately consulted before these 
 courses can be chosen. Consultations with 
 instructors about all courses are frequent. 
 That most effective means of distributing 
 information, the talk of students, goes on 
 unceasingly. With time, perhaps, means 
 may be devised for informing a student 
 more largely what he is choosing. The 
 fullest information is desirable. That 
 which is at present most needed is, I 
 think, some rough indication of the re- 
 lations of the several provinces of study 
 to one another. Information of this sort 
 is peculiarly hard to supply, because the 
 knowledge on which it professes to rest
 
 132 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 cannot be precise and unimpeachable. 
 We deal here with intricate problems, 
 in regard to which experts are far from 
 agreed, problems where the different point 
 of view provided in the nature of each in- 
 dividual will rightly readjust whatever gen- 
 eral conclusions are drawn. The old type 
 of college had an easy way of settling these 
 troublesome matters dogmatically, by vot- 
 ing, in open faculty-meeting, what should 
 be counted the normal sequence of studies, 
 and what their mixture. But as the votes 
 of different colleges showed no uniformity, 
 people have gradually come to perceive 
 that the subject is one where only large 
 outlines can distinctly be made out. 1 To 
 
 1 I may not have a better opportunity than this to 
 clear up a petty difficulty which seems to agitate some 
 of my critics. They say they want the degree of A. B. 
 to mean something definite, while at present, under the 
 elective system, it means one thing for John Doe, and 
 something altogether different for his classmate, Rich- 
 ard Roe. That is true. Besides embodying the gen- 
 eral signification that the bearer has been working four 
 years in a way to satisfy college guardians, the stately 
 letters do take on an individual variation of meaning for
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 133 
 
 these large outlines I think it important 
 to direct the attention of undergraduates. 
 In most German universities a course of 
 Encyclopddie is offered, a course which 
 gives in brief a survey of the sciences, and 
 attempts to fix approximately the place of 
 each in the total organization of knowl- 
 
 every man who wins them. They must do so as long as 
 we are engaged in the formation of living persons. If 
 the college were a factory, our case would be different. 
 We might then offer a label which would keep its 
 identity of meaning for all the articles turned out. 
 Wherever education has been a living thing, the single 
 degree has always contained this element of variety. 
 The German degree is as diverse in meaning as ours. 
 The degree of the English university is diverse, and 
 more diverse for Honors men the only ones who can 
 properly be said to deserve it than for inert Pass men. 
 Degrees in this country have, from the first, had con- 
 siderable diversity, college differing from college in 
 requirement, and certainly student from student in at- 
 tainment. That twenty-five years ago we were ap- 
 proaching too great uniformity in the signification of 
 degrees, I suppose most educators now admit. That 
 was a mechanical and stagnant period, and men have 
 brought over from it to the more active days of the 
 present ideals formed then. Precision of statement 
 goes with figures, with etiquette, with military matters ; 
 but descriptions of the quality of persons must be stated 
 in the round.
 
 134 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 edge. I am not aware that such a course 
 exists in any American college. Indeed, 
 there was hardly a place for it till dog- 
 matic prescription was shaken. But if 
 something of the kind were now estab- 
 lished in the freshman year, our young 
 men might be relieved of a certain intel- 
 lectual short-sightedness, and the choices 
 of one year might better keep in view 
 those of the other three. 
 
 III. And now granting that a student 
 has started with good intentions and is 
 well informed about the direction where 
 profit lies, still have we any assurance that 
 he will push those intentions with a fair 
 degree of tenacity through the distractions 
 which beset his daily path ? We need, in- 
 deed we must have, a third class of helpful 
 limitations which may secure the persist- 
 ent adhesion of our student to his chosen 
 line of work. Probably this class of limi- 
 tations is the most important and com- 
 plex of all. To yield a paying return, 
 study must be stuck to. A decision has
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 135 
 
 little meaning unless the volition of to- 
 day brings in its train a volition to-morrow. 
 Self-direction implies such patient continu- 
 ance in well-doing that only after persist- 
 ence has become somewhat habitual can 
 choice be called mature. To establish 
 onward-leading habits, therefore, should 
 be one of the chief objects in devising 
 limitations of election. Only we must not 
 mistake ; we must look below the surface. 
 Mechanical diligence often covers mental 
 sloth. It is not habits of passive docility 
 that are desirable, habits of timidity and 
 uncriticising acceptance. Against form- 
 ing these pernicious and easily acquired 
 habits, it may be necessary even to erect 
 barriers. The habit wanted is the habit 
 of spontaneous attack. Prescription dead- 
 ened this vital habit ; it mechanized. His 
 task removed, the student had little in- 
 dependent momentum. Election invigo- 
 rates the springs of action. Formerly I 
 did not see this, and I favored prescribed 
 systems, thinking them systems of duty.
 
 136 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 That absence of an aggressive intellectual 
 life which prescribed studies induce, I, like 
 many others, mistook for faithfulness. Ex- 
 perience has instructed me. I no longer 
 have any question that for the average 
 man sound habits of steady endeavor 
 grow best in fields of choice. Emer- 
 son's words are words of soberness : 
 
 " He that worketh high and wise 
 
 Nor pauses in his plan, 
 Will take the sun out of the skies 
 Ere freedom out of man." 
 
 Furthermore, in attempting to stimulate 
 persistence I believe we must ultimately 
 rely on the rational interest in study which 
 we can arouse and hold. Undoubtedly 
 much can be done to save this interest 
 from disturbance and to hold vacillating 
 attention fixed upon it ; but it, and it 
 alone, is to be the driving force. Meth- 
 ods of college government must be reck- 
 oned wise as they push into the foreground 
 the intrinsic charm of wisdom, mischievous 
 as they hide it behind fidelity to technical
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 137 
 
 demand. In other matters we readily ac- 
 knowledge interest as an efficient force. 
 We call it a force as broad as the worth 
 of knowledge, and as deep as the curiosity 
 of man. " Put your heart into your work," 
 we say, " if you will make it excellent." A 
 dozen proverbs tell that it is love that 
 makes the world go round. Every em- 
 ployment of life springs from an under- 
 lying desire. The cricketer wants to win 
 the game ; the fisherman to catch fish ; 
 the farmer to gather crops ; the merchant 
 to make money ; the physician to cure 
 his patient; the student to become wise. 
 Eliminate desire, put in its place allegiance 
 to the rules of a game, and what, in any of 
 these cases, would be the chance of persist- 
 ent endeavor ? It seems almost a truism 
 to say that limitations of personal effort 
 designed to strengthen persistency must 
 be such as will heighten the wish and 
 clear its path to its object. 
 
 Obvious as is the truth here presented, 
 it seems in some degree to have escaped
 
 138 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 the attention of my critics. After show- 
 ing that the grade of scholarship at Har- 
 vard steadily rises, that our students 
 become more decorous and their methods 
 of work less childish, I stated that, under 
 an extremely loose mode of regulating at- 
 tendance five sixths of the exercises were 
 attended by all our men, worst and best, 
 sick and well, most reckless and most dis- 
 creet. Few portions of my obnoxious 
 paper have occasioned a louder outcry. 
 I am told of a neighboring college where 
 the benches show but three per cent of 
 absentees. I wonder what the percentage 
 is in Charlestown State Prison. Nobody 
 doubts that attendance will be closer 
 if compelled. But the interesting ques- 
 tion still remains, " Are students by such 
 means learning habits of spontaneous regu- 
 larity ? " This question can be answered 
 only when the concealing restraint is re- 
 moved. It has been removed at Harvard, 
 in my judgment too largely removed, 
 and the great body of our students are seen
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 139 
 
 to desire learning and to desire it all the 
 time. Is it certain that the students of 
 other colleges, if left with little or no re- 
 straint, would show a better record? The 
 point of fidelity and regularity, it is said, 
 is of supreme importance. So it is. But 
 fidelity and regularity in study, not in at- 
 tending recitations. If ever the Harvard 
 system is perfected, so that students here 
 are as eager for knowledge as the best 
 class of German university men, I do not 
 believe we shall see a lower rate of ab- 
 sence; only then, each absence will be 
 used, as it is not at present, for a studious 
 purpose. The modern teacher stimulates 
 private reading, exacts theses, directs work 
 in libraries. Pupils engaged in these things 
 are not dependent on recitations as text- 
 book school-boys are. The grade of higher 
 education cannot rise much so long as the 
 present extreme stress is laid on appearance 
 in the class-room. 
 
 In saying this I would not be under- 
 stood to defend the method of dealing with
 
 140 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 absences which has for some years been 
 practised at Harvard. I think the method 
 bad. I have always thought it so, and have 
 steadily favored a different system. The 
 behavior of our students under a regula- 
 tion so loose seems to me a striking tes- 
 timony to the scholarly spirit prevalent 
 here. As such I mentioned it in my first 
 paper, and as such I would again call at- 
 tention to it. But I am not satisfied with 
 the present good results. I want to im- 
 press on every student that absence from 
 the class-room can be justified by nothing 
 short of illness or a scholarly purpose. For 
 a gainful purpose the merchant is occa- 
 sionally absent from his office ; for a gain- 
 ful purpose a scholar of mine may omit a 
 recitation. But Smith can be absent prof- 
 itably when Brown would meet with loss. 
 I accordingly object to methods of limiting 
 absence which exact the same numerical 
 regularity of all. College records may look 
 clean, yet students be learning little about 
 duty. Limitation, in my judgment, should
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 141 
 
 be so adjusted as to strengthen the man's 
 personal adhesion to plans of daily study. 
 Such limitations cannot be fixed by statute 
 and worked by a single clerk. Moral dis- 
 cipline is not a thing to be supplied by 
 wholesale. Professors must be individually 
 charged with the oversight of their men. 
 I would have excuses for occasional ab- 
 sence made to the instructor, and I should 
 expect him to count it a part of his work 
 to see that the better purposes of his schol- 
 ars did not grow feeble. A professor who 
 exercised such supervisory power slackly 
 would make his course the resort of the 
 indolent ; one who was over-stringent would 
 see himself deserted by indolent and earnest 
 alike. My rule would be that no student 
 be allowed to present himself at an exam- 
 ination who could not show his teacher's 
 certificate that his attendance on daily work 
 was satisfactory. Traditions in this coun- 
 try and in Germany are so different that I 
 should have confidence in a method work- 
 ing well here though it worked ill there.
 
 142 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 At any rate, whenever it fell into decay, it 
 could a proviso necessary in all moral 
 matters be readjusted. A rule some- 
 thing like this the Harvard Faculty has 
 recently adopted by voting that "any in- 
 structor, with the approval of the Dean, 
 may at any time exclude from his course 
 any student who in his judgment has neg- 
 lected the work of the course." Probably 
 the amount of absence which has hitherto 
 occurred at Harvard will under this vote 
 diminish. 
 
 Suppose, then, by these limitations on a 
 student's caprice we have secured his per- 
 sistence in outward endeavor, still one thing 
 more is needed. We have brought him 
 bodily to a recitation room ; but his mind 
 must be there too, his aroused and active 
 mind. Limitations that will secure this 
 slippery part of the person are difficult to 
 devise. Nevertheless, they are worth study- 
 ing. Their object is plain. They are to 
 lead a student to do something every day ; 
 to aid him to overcome those tendencies to
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 143 
 
 procrastination, self-confidence, and passive 
 absorption, which are the regular and cal- 
 culable dangers of youth. They are to 
 teach him how not to cram, to inspire him 
 with respect for steady effort, and to enable 
 him each year to find such effort more 
 habitual to himself. These are hard tasks. 
 The old education tried to meet them by 
 the use of daily recitations, a plan not with- 
 out advantages. The new education is pre- 
 serving the valuable features of recitations 
 by adopting and developing the Seminar. 
 But recitations pure and simple have seri- 
 ous drawbacks. They presuppose a text- 
 book, which, while it brings definiteness, 
 brings also narrowness of view. The learn- 
 er masters a book, not a subject. After-life 
 possesses nothing analogous to the text- 
 book. A struggling man wins what he 
 wants from many books, from his own 
 thought, from frequent consultations. Why 
 should not a student be disciplined in the 
 ways he must afterwards employ ? More- 
 over, recitations have the disadvantage that
 
 144 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 no large number of men can take part on 
 any single day. The times of trial either 
 become amenable to reckoning, or, in order 
 to prevent reckoning, a teacher must resort 
 to schemes which do not commend him to 
 his class. Undoubtedly in recitation the 
 reciter gains, but the gains of the rest of 
 the class are small. The listeners would 
 be more profited by instruction. An hour 
 with an expert should carry students for- 
 ward ; to occupy it in ascertaining where 
 they now stand is wasteful. For all these 
 reasons there has been of late years a 
 strong reaction against recitations. Lec- 
 tures have been introduced, and the time 
 formerly spent by a professor in hearing 
 boys is now spent by boys in hearing a 
 professor. Plainly in this there is a gain, 
 but a gain which needs careful limitation 
 if the student's persistence in work is to 
 be retained. A pure lecture system is a 
 broad road to ignorance. Students are 
 entertained or bored, but at the end of a 
 month they know little more than at the
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 145 
 
 beginning. Lectures always seem to me 
 an inheritance from the days when books 
 were not. Learning how often must it 
 be said ! is not acceptance ; it is criti- 
 cism, it is attack, it is doing. An active 
 element is everywhere involved in it. Per- 
 sonal sanction is wanted for every step. 
 One who will grow wise must perform pro- 
 cesses himself, not sit at ease and behold 
 another's performance. 
 
 These simple truths are now tolerably 
 understood at Harvard. There remain in 
 the college few courses of pure recitations 
 or of pure lectures. I wish all were for- 
 bidden by statute. In almost all courses, 
 in one way or another, frequent opportu- 
 nity is given the student to show what he 
 is doing. In some, especially in elemen- 
 tary courses, lectures run parallel with a 
 text-book. In some, theses, that is, written 
 discussions, are exacted monthly, half-yearly, 
 annually, in addition to examinations. In 
 some, examinations are frequent. In some, 
 a daily question, to be answered in writing 
 10
 
 146 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 on the spot, is offered to the whole class. 
 Often, especially in philosophical subjects, 
 the hour is occupied with debate between 
 officer and students. More and more, phys- 
 ical subjects are taught by the laboratory, 
 linguistic and historical by the library. 
 In a living university a great variety of 
 methods spring up, according to the nature 
 of the subject and the personality of the 
 teacher. Variety should exist. In con- 
 stantly diversified ways each student should 
 be assured that he is expected to be doing 
 something all the time, and that somebody 
 besides himself knows what he is doing. 
 As yet this assurance is not attained ; we 
 can only claim to be working toward it. 
 Every year we discover some fresh limi- 
 tation which will make persistence more 
 natural, neglect more strange. I believe 
 study at Harvard is to-day more interested, 
 energetic, and persistent than it has ever 
 been before. But that is no ground for 
 satisfaction. A powerful college must for- 
 ever be dissatisfied. Each year it must
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 147 
 
 address itself anew to strengthening the 
 tenacity of its students in their zeal for 
 knowledge. 
 
 By the side of these larger limitations in 
 the interest of persistency, it may be well 
 to mention one or two examples of smaller 
 ones which have the same end in view. 
 By some provision it must be made diffi- 
 cult to withdraw from a study once chosen. 
 Choice should be deliberate and then be 
 final. It probably will not be deliberate 
 unless it is understood to be final. A few 
 weeks may be allowed for an inspection of 
 a chosen course, but at the close of the 
 first month's teaching the Harvard Faculty 
 tie up their students and allow change only 
 on petition and for the most convincing 
 cause. An elective college which did not 
 make changes of electives difficult would 
 be an engine for discouraging intentionality 
 and persistence. 
 
 I incline to think, too, that a regulation 
 forbidding elementary courses in the later 
 years would render our education more
 
 148 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 coherent. In this matter elective colleges 
 have an opportunity which prescribed ones 
 miss. In order to be fair to all the sci- 
 ences, College Faculties are obliged to 
 scatter fragments of them throughout the 
 length and breadth of prescribed curricula. 
 Twenty-five years ago every Harvard man 
 waited till his senior year before beginning 
 philosophy, acoustics, history, and political 
 economy. To-day the fourteen other New 
 England colleges, most of whom, like the 
 Harvard of twenty-five years ago, offer a 
 certain number of elective studies, still 
 show senior years largely occupied with 
 elementary studies. Five forbid philoso- 
 phy before the senior year ; eight, political 
 economy ; two, history ; six, geology. Out 
 of the seven colleges which offer some one 
 of the eastern languages, all except Har- 
 vard oblige the alphabet to be learned in 
 the senior year. Of the six which offer 
 Italian or Spanish, Harvard alone permits 
 a beginning to be made before the junior 
 year, while two take up these languages
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 149 
 
 for the first time in the senior year. In 
 three New England colleges German can- 
 not be begun till the junior year. In a 
 "majority, a physical subject is begun in the 
 junior and another in the senior year. At 
 Yale nobody but a senior can study chem- 
 istry. Such postponement, and by conse- 
 quence such fragmentary work, may be 
 necessary where early college years are 
 crowded with prescribed studies. But an 
 elective system can employ its later years 
 to better advantage. It can bring to a 
 mature understanding the interests which 
 freshmen and sophomores have already ac- 
 quired. Elementary studies are not ma- 
 turing studies ; they do not make the fibre 
 of a student firm. To studies of a solidify- 
 ing sort the last years should be devoted. 
 I should like to forbid seniors to take any 
 elementary study whatever, and to forbid 
 juniors all except philosophy, political econ- 
 omy, history, fine arts, Sanskrit, Hebrew, 
 and law. Under such a rule we should 
 graduate more men who would be first rate
 
 150 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 at something ; and a man who is first rate 
 at something is generally pretty good at 
 anything. 
 
 Such, then, are a few examples of the 
 ways in which choice may be limited so 
 as to become strong. They are but exam- 
 ples, intended merely to draw attention to 
 the three kinds of limitation still possible. 
 Humble ways they may seem, not particu- 
 larly interesting to hear about ; business 
 methods one might call them. But by 
 means of these and such as these the 
 young scholar becomes clearer in inten- 
 tion, larger in information, hardier in per- 
 sistence. In urging such means I shall be 
 seen to be no thick and thin advocate of 
 election. That I have never been. Origi- 
 nally a doubter, I have come to regard the 
 elective system, that is, election under 
 such limitations as I have described, as 
 the safest indeed as the only possible 
 course which education can now take. I 
 advocate it heartily as a system which 
 need not carry us too fast or too far in any
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 151 
 
 one direction, as a system so inherently 
 flexible that its own great virtues readily 
 unite with those of an alien type. Under 
 its sheltering charge the worthier advan- 
 tages of both grouped and prescribed 
 systems are attainable. I proclaim it, 
 therefore, not as a popular cry nor as an 
 educational panacea, but as a sober oppor- 
 tunity for moral and intellectual training. 
 Limited as it is at Harvard, I see that it 
 works admirably with the studious, stimu- 
 latingly with those of weaker will, not un- 
 endurably with the depraved. These are 
 great results. They cannot be set aside 
 by calling them the outcome of " individ- 
 ualism." In a certain sense they are. But 
 " individualism " is an uncertain term. In 
 every one of us there is a contemptible 
 individuality, grounded in what is epheme- 
 ral and capriciously personal. Systematic 
 election, as I have shown, puts limitations 
 on this. But there is a noble individuality 
 which should be the object of our fostering 
 care. Nothing that lends it strength and
 
 152 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 fineness can be counted trivial. To form 
 a true individuality is, indeed, the ideal 
 of the elective system. Let me briefly 
 sketch my conception of that ideal. 
 
 George Herbert, praising God for the 
 physical world which He has made, says 
 that in it " all things have their will, yet 
 none but thine." Such a free harmony 
 between thinking man and a Lord of his 
 thought it is the office of education to 
 bring about. At the start it does not ex- 
 ist. The child is aware of his -own will, 
 and he is aware of little else. He im- 
 agines that one pleasing fancy may be 
 willed as easily as another. As he ma- 
 tures, he discovers that his will is effective 
 when it accords with the make of the 
 world and ineffective when it does not. 
 This discovery, bringing as it does in- 
 creased respect for the make of the world 
 and even for its maker, degrades or enno- 
 bles according as the facts of the world are 
 now viewed as restrictive finalities or as an 
 apparatus for larger self-expression. See-
 
 THE NEW EDUCATION. 153 
 
 ing the power of that which is not himself, 
 a man may become passively receptive, 
 and say, " Then I am to have no will of my 
 own ; " or he may become newly energetic, 
 knowing that though he can have no will 
 of his separate own, yet all the power of 
 God is his if he will but understand. A 
 man of the latter sort is spiritually edu- 
 cated. Much still remains to be done in 
 understanding special laws ; and with each 
 fresh understanding, a fresh possibility of 
 individual life is disclosed. The worth, 
 however, of the whole process lies in the 
 man's honoring his own will, but honoring 
 it only as it grows strong through accord- 
 ance with the will of God. 
 
 Now into our colleges comes a mixed 
 multitude made up of all the three classes 
 named : the childish, who imagine they 
 can will anything ; the docile, so passive 
 in the presence of an ordered world that 
 they have little individual will left ; the 
 spiritually-minded or original, who with 
 strong: interests of their own seek to de-
 
 154 THE NEW EDUCATION. 
 
 velop these through living contact with 
 truths which they have not made. Our 
 educational modes must meet them all, 
 respecting their wills wherever wise, and 
 teaching the feeble to discriminate fanciful 
 from righteous desires. For carrying for- 
 ward such a training the elective system 
 seems to me to have peculiar aptitudes. 
 What I have called its limitations will be 
 seen to be spiritual assistances. To the 
 further invention of such there is no end. 
 A watchful patience is the one great requi- 
 site, patience in directors, instructed criti- 
 cism on the part of the public, and a brave 
 expression of confidence when confidence 
 is seen to have been earned. 
 
 University Press, Cambridge : John Wilson & Son.
 
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 1934 
 
 
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