Making Education Hit the Mark

APRIL, 1906

BY WILLARD GILES PARSONS

IN hitting a mark a great deal depends on clearness of vision. It is advisable to decide, in the first place, at which mark to aim. In the matter of arranging a system of public schools the state is trying to hit a mark, and it behooves it to know just what that is and where it lies. And in the putting of the system into practice, all the way along the line, it would be well if the aim could be kept in mind, distinct and clear. The teacher who assigns the daily lessons, the board that determines curricula, the public that supports and influences schools, need constantly to ask themselves two questions: What is the mark ? and, How can it be reached ?

It is, indeed, difficult to keep one’s eyes open all the time, difficult to keep asking these questions and answering them; it is natural enough, perhaps, that they should go unanswered and unasked now and then. But if the eyes of education are shut too long a time, the aim is sure to miss. Then it is time to wake up. And such a moment seems, in a certain point, to be the present.

As for the teachers, it may be they do sometimes incline to assign the next lesson because it comes next in the book. We hear much, and need to hear much, about the necessity of elevating the standard of instruction. But the teachers are the least of this trouble; they keep their eyes open pretty well; and they are better than the system.

The standard most in need of elevation is that of the intelligence, whether localized in school boards or left at large in the community, by which the system is arranged and directed.

From a multitude of causes the direction has gone blind. School boards are all too regularly composed of men ignorant of that which they prescribe; college councils are the scene of faction and of misshapen compromise. Blinding to both, and to the public as well, is the confusion and forgetfulness of aim. We must clear up our notions as to what we want to do in our public schools; we must separate and distinguish our various aims; we must direct our education straight; we must find out where we wish to go, or we shall continue to arrive nowhere.

The broadest division of the aims of public education gives us two: cultural and vocational. To this division of aims corresponds a like division of the subjects of study, some being properly cultural, others properly vocational. To it, again, corresponds a division of kinds of study: for cultural study, as a rule, is general and broad; while vocational study, as a rule, is special and minute. Vocational studies train to produce; cultural studies, to appreciate. The proper result of vocational study is skill; of cultural study, taste.

The confusion of these aims is the chief cause of the present blindness of our education. Nearly every course in every school tries for both at once, and consequently misses altogether. For different aims require differently directed courses. Vocational aims require vocational courses, dealing with vocational subjects; cultural aims require cultural courses, dealing with cultural subjects. Is that not almost too obvious a remark ? Yet it needs to be made, and made again, and shouted, for education is getting a little deaf (in the high places) as well as blind. And to this must be added the insistence that each aim be kept pure. In vocational courses the vocational aim must be supreme. In cultural courses the cultural aim must be supreme.

Cultural subjects may at a later period be pursued for vocational ends. This occurs whenever a student determines to specialize, most commonly through a desire to teach. A student who will teach a subject must have special and minute work in it; he makes it his vocation, and needs vocational instruction. But a course in a cultural subject, when guided by a vocational aim, is a vocational course. Hence we shall include such under vocational courses, or, when an exacter term is desirable, we may call them vocational-cultural courses.

Now these two aims are separate and distinct. Partly so by the nature of the various subjects of study appropriate to each; for vocational subjects may not profitably be taught for cultural purposes, and the vocational end in cultural subjects may on no account be set until the pure cultural aim has been attained. Partly so, again, by the difference of desire on the part of the students; an intelligent student wants instruction for one purpose or the other, and not for both at once. Hence separate courses are necessary. But this — in this discrimination — is where our system of education fails. It teaches vocational subjects partly with the cultural aim, cultural subjects partly with the vocational aim. In theory, indeed, it admits the distinction; but in practice it has gone off into the jungle.

Of course taste results from a vocational course, — a vocational subject taught with a vocational aim, — to a slight degree; and, likewise to a slight degree, a cultural course — a cultural subject taught for a cultural aim — results in skill. Taste and skill are not wholly disjunct. Taste must try its hand before it can fully appreciate; and skill cannot produce well till it has learned to judge. But the point is that in aim the two are separate, that the routes leading to the two are different routes, that the skill which results from a cultural course, the taste which results from a vocational course, are by-products, not included in the aim, but wholly adventitious. They are not to be rejected; but they are not sought. The single thing that should be sought is, in the vocational course, skill, in the cultural course, taste.

The fault of the vocational courses is that they do not give true, practical skill. They talk too much about inculcating virtue. It is not virtue one wants in his carpenter or his lawyer, but virtuosity. Just as the vocational student, fixing his eye on skill, is about to shoot straight, the theorizing educator nudges his elbow and whispers he must take a wing off culture, too. Then skill escapes, and only a moulted feather flutters down from taste. The nudge spoiled the shot. Vocational courses must leave culture to the cultural courses, and attend to their own business. They must make themselves practical. They must look out into the world and see what it wants of them. They must keep their eye on the market.

Manual training,therefore, shouldplace its products on sale, and fill orders for work it is prepared to do; business training should secure business work from business men for its students, and professional training, likewise, professional work from professional men. This will serve to keep the training real and of value in the world as well as in the school. Something of this kind is done in schools of law, where the student is allowed to do law work in offices; and pedagogy sends its students out to observe actual teaching in the schools. But the practice is merely sporadic, and nowhere is the principle recognized as fundamental.

Vocational training is too scholastic, too much shut away from the world at large. In the old days of apprenticeship and Wanderjähre this was not so. Then the learner was up against the market from start to finish. His world was the world, and he moved about in it until he knew it as it was. Nor will any one contend that the work of those days — the days of Peter Vischer and of Botticelli — was inferior in virtue, beauty, ideality, to the work of to-day. The peculiar problem of art-craft is to take the necessary, the useful, and render it beautiful. There shall result no loss to any craft, nor to any business or profession, if it keep the preparation real, meet the market from the start, and turn its students, so far as possible, into apprentices of life.

The cultural courses, on the other hand, do not give true, vital taste. They talk too much about scientific methods and exactness of knowledge. Analysis may furnish taste a reason (though only the pedagogue cares what it is), but it cannot give taste birth. Taste depends upon liking. To have taste in a matter is, first, to have taste for it. It is, indeed, commonly claimed that study of a subject at school will awaken a love for it. This is the common cant of education. It is indulged in by school boards, by hobby-riding pedagogians, by teachers on parade. But everybody knows it is prate, and the schoolboy most of all. He does not learn to love anything because he studies it in school, but, if he does love anything he studies there, it is because of his own natural instinct for it, and distinctly in spite of what he is made to do with it in school.

The charge is, perhaps, especially applicable to the high school. Take it, for instance, in literature. How many learn to love Homer? What boy carries his Æneid to the woods, to read unbeknown to his teacher ? Or ask an intelligent and wide-awake boy — not a crawling highgrade seeker after marks — why he never reads Shakespeare at home, and he will reply, “Because I get enough of him in school.” This is the attitude of those who are learning to “love” Shakespeare!

It would seem, indeed, from the condition of Shakespeare on our stage, that we all get enough of him in school. A big noise is made on the occasion of a big-priced production by a big-advertised star, that the full house refutes the charge that Americans do not love Shakespeare. It does no such thing. It refutes nothing but the supposition that Americans love anything so much as bigness. To take the monetary success of occasional and extraordinary performances, appealing to our liking for the unusual and the demonstrative, as indicative of love, suggests that we no longer know what love is. Love of Shakespeare on the stage would mean the success of frequent, ordinary performances in every town large enough for a high school and a theatre. Such, for instance, as the love of Wagner in Germany. Or, again, of Shakespeare. For it is not only in her own dramatist, but in ours as well, that Germany can teach us what art-love is. The appreciation of Shakespeare is far more general and genuine there than here. The continuousness of his success, despite the frequency and mediocrity of the performances, despite the lack of all bigness and eclat, shows that it is Shakespeare that is loved. But then, what could one expect? The Germans do not, like us, get enough of him in school.

The dose, it must be confessed, that we receive in school, is hardly such as to taste like more. A glance at the Shakespeare textbooks is sufficient. One quarter introduction, one quarter Shakespeare, two quarters commentary. No healthyminded boy can relish such a sandwich. He feels, somewhere in the silent depths of his silent consciousness, that there is something wrong when he is expected to love Shakespeare. He is quite likely (little innocent!) to think the wrong lies with him. He will admit, therefore, that he ought to like Shakespeare; but nothing short of the willingness to lie for the sake of shutting off inquiry —a virtue born of schools — will compel him to admit that he does. Nor, considering the Shakespeare of the schools, can this be any but an encouraging symptom of the persistent sanity of youth.

The scientific, minute study of Shakespeare, the use of his plays as material for grammatical analysis, philological investigation, historical research, — as now common in the high school, — belongs only to the last years of the college and to the graduate school. The proper study of Shakespeare in the high school is to feel; to read Shakespeare, see Shakespeare, play Shakespeare. This might awaken love. It would certainly result, in the high school, in a truer, broader acquaintance; in the college, in a truer, sounder criticism; on the stage, in a truer and more frequent presentation.

And this is true not only of Shakespeare, nor of all literature alone, but of all cultural subjects, — that taste, being the one thing to hit, is not even aimed at; that the love the school should wake it does but kill.

There is something pathetically ludicrous in the sure, complaisant way in which the schools assure themselves they are teaching love. What sensible person could expect Tom, Dick, and Harry, gathered from homes of Puritan gloom or philistine glitter, not to speak of Egyptian darkness, to fall in love, at sixteen, with Lycidas or the Commemoration Ode ? If the schools really meant to teach love, they would choose a gentler incline up the slopes of Parnassus. They would go down into the valley and meet the student in his own loved haunts; thence they would lead him gradually up the mountain, progressing step by step. But, even if we could expect the average schoolboy to love on sight the sudden peaks of poetry, what a way to take of presenting him to them! Suppose it is this: “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.” The school says: “Parse, analyze, paraphrase, name figure of speech, and then, — don’t fail! — enjoy! ” But the schools have no real intention of teaching love. Single teachers, scattered here and there, have; but they cannot. For the school will not allow them, having forgotten the value of love, of taste, of art, and being wholly given over to the lust of the scientific, the analytic, the exact. The boy who can scan and parse his Shakespeare passes, though he be blank and cold to the poetry and feeling. But the boy who cannot parse and scan fails, though he read with understanding and feel with inner fire. For feeling is subjective (as they say), illusory, and unstatistical, while parsing is a science, and so worth teaching. But — do we not know it in our sore and wearied souls ? — in things of culture, in things of art, much knowledge, without love, is as sounding brass.

The confusion in cultural courses of the aims of taste and skill has been attended by confusion in the order and advance of learning. All study deals with phenomena. Its first essay is to make their acquaintance. This it does by observation. Its second essay is to formulate their theory. This it does by analysis. The succession is unalterably fixed: first, observation of phenomena for the purpose of acquaintance; second, analysis of phenomena for the purpose of theory.

These two stages of learning correspond, in cultural subjects, to the two stages of their courses already indicated: pure cultural and vocational-cultural. The pure cultural course seeks acquaintance by means of observation. The vocational-cultural course seeks theory by means of analysis. But the vocational aim, as the aim of vocational-cultural courses, has crept into the field of the cultural at the remote corner where this borders the vocational field, the graduate school, and thence has gradually spread outward over the entire region of the cultural. It has insinuated itself into pure cultural courses and turned them into vocational. It has banished the original aim of taste. It has mixed theory with acquaintance and analysis with observation, until the very order of knowledge has been confused and lost.

The first cause of all this disastrous confusion is to be found in the undue expansion which the imported German scientific spirit has undergone on American soil. The American university has done well to take lessons from the German; but it forgot, in attempting to copy, that it rests upon a much smaller base than its model. The accomplishment previous to college is much greater in Germany than here. There, on entering a university, students have already acquired a sufficiently broad acquaintance and power of observation; they are ready for analysis and theory. The work of a German university is consequently justified in being, in cultural subjects, chiefly analytic and theoretical. But here, on entering college, students have not formed a sufficient acquaintance nor power of observation; they are not yet ready for pure analysis and theory. The work of the American college is consequently not justified in being chiefly analytic and theoretical. Here, then, is a discrepancy; here lies the fault.

In the way of a remedy, the worst has been selected. Since the trouble is that students in college are not prepared for courses of analysis and theory, lacking too much in observation and acquaintance, the obvious thing to do is to increase their acquaintance and observation, either by lengthening the period of preparation before college or by postponing in college the advent of analysis and theory to the later years. But neither of these plans was followed. For the dominating influence was that of the graduate school, the present veiled prophet of our education. Its learned investigators, — was not their word the final law ? But they, absorbed in analysis and theory, engaged in running down the Germanic prefix ge, wrestling with Æolic forms in the dialect of Homer, deciphering the correspondence of a Thomas Cromwell, and such like, — what should they care for so infantile an aim as the acquisition of culture ? Moreover, they had quite forgotten that their beloved analysis and theory cannot properly begin except upon a broad basis of acquaintance and observation. Dominating the college, they made its work chiefly analytic and theoretical, — error number one. When they found that the college students could not do the analytic work that they required, they demanded that the high school train in analytic methods, — error number two. Thus the vocational aim of the graduate school in subjects of culture has been thrust downward through the college and the high school, and even come to permeate the grammar school, so that now the whole of education from start to finish has become a matter of analysis and theory. Culture and taste receive none but an empty attention. The order of learning is thrown into a confusion almost inextricable.

The sore point in this graduate school remedy, and one that must make even its tough-skinned inventors occasionally wince, is that it does not remedy. For analysis and theory are not sufficient to themselves; they can exist only, as has been said above, upon a broad and solid basis of acquaintance and observation; and in curtailing and vitiating these the remedy weakens the very support it was supposed to strengthen.

First, then, observation of phenomena to form acquaintance. In analysis there are two steps: study of classified phenomena to gain known theory; and investigation of unclassified phenomena to establish new theory. Such the unalterable order. It is true, of course, that observation must last throughout. Analysis must be accompanied by fresh observation, and, again, fresh observation must accompany investigation. And upon investigation will attend analysis. But it remains true that observation must make the start and be developed to a certain power before analysis may set in; and that investigation must be postponed till last of all. In each of the three stages the aim of the preceding will be present, but subordinated from aim to means; while the proper aim of each stage will reign supreme.

It is impossible to assign each of these aims to a separate school, to say that each school is to be dominated by one of them. Since, indeed, the first and last aims will naturally fall to the first and last schools, the aim of the grammar school must be observation for acquaintance and that of the graduate school be investigation for theory. But in the intermediate schools, the high school and the college, the aim in this regard depends upon the stage which the particular study has reached. A subject in which a good acquaintance has been gained in the grammar school may aim at theory in the high school. But cultural subjects begun in the high school, or in college, must aim there only at acquaintance. The point is simply that in every subject, wherever begun, the order of learning must be followed.

At present this order is everywhere contravened. In the grammar school the broad and general study which its own aim, the acquisition of information, demands, is not preserved. Minute and special study, belonging to a later aim and school, is introduced. We have already seen how this has come about, by pressure from above. That it is tolerated by the people is largely due to the popular impression that thoroughness of knowledge demands minuteness of detail, —an impression that is part of the general superstition of the scientific, in which our age delights to debase itself. Even were it true, it would not constitute the final word. For is thoroughness of knowledge the whole of education ? Is there nothing else in the human brain to satisfy than a craving for statistics ? Is there no feeling to be trained up to taste ? Is there no aesthetic side to be awakened, guided, formed ? We are so fearfully under the domination of the scientific spirit, we of this age, that we are blind and deaf to all else. Our aesthetic side, our taste, our feeling, we are in danger of losing. Worst of all, we regard the scientific attitude toward life as something final, conclusive, perfect. This is the superstition of the scientific. Finality in learning means atrophy as surely as in religion. It blinds us to our faults, and consequently to our need of change and progress. The tyranny of science is not forever; no more than was the tyranny of art. We look back to the Renaissance, an age dominated by the artistic even as ours by the scientific spirit, and we point out plainly enough its dangers and faults. Due, we pronounce, to the predominance of the artistic spirit; to the predominance, ultimately, of one spirit; for perfection would lie in an interblending of spirits many and diverse, in the union of the scientific, artistic, religious, in the harmony of the good, the beautiful, the true; and progress is not resting finally in any one of these, but turning incessantly from one to the other, developing, adapting, unifying. Then, leaving the Renaissance and coming to ourselves, we seem to forget our recent wisdom, and, losing our vision at short range, fancy the scientific attitude final and complete, fancy the domination of one spirit safe. We call for thoroughness of knowledge, and, gaining the body, perceive not if it be a carcass.

But, taking thoroughness of knowledge not for the single end of education, which it is not, but for the high and essential end it is, it cannot be maintained that it demands minuteness of detail. It depends, simply, upon what knowledge you are aiming at. Thus, if you want a general outline of a subject, you can make the knowledge of the outline thorough without going into detail. Thoroughness of knowledge is not minuteness, but readiness and accuracy. A thorough general knowledge of our Civil War, for instance, does not require a knowledge of every battle, but, the general outline being fixed, an accurate and ready knowledge of that. The confusion of thoroughness with minuteness even acts to prevent thoroughness. For, with the mass of detail demanded by minuteness, it is beyond the student’s power to gain an accurate view of the subject presented or to hold in readiness what he has been able to perceive. Thus he gains neither minute nor general knowledge. And he is far from gaining thoroughness. What he does gain is a false and pernicious idea of what knowledge is. For he is taught that his faulty and hesitating recollection is knowledge. On the other hand, if the subject matter of a cultural course be kept general, it will prove possible for the student to win an accurate view and to keep ready what he has won. He will know that his knowledge is general, and he will have learned what general knowledge is. He will be prepared to pass on to the learning of what special knowledge is. Thus he will have made a true start toward a knowledge of what knowledge is, — a sine qua non of education which our present education is too confused to give.

The subject in which the grammar school (so-called) contravenes most sharply the law of the order of learning is, perhaps, grammar. For grammar, being the analytic and theoretical study of language, does not belong in the grammar school at all. The scientific classification of phenomena cannot begin until the phenomena have been assembled and made familiar. To this law of learning language is no exception. The language study proper to the grammar school is observation and acquaintance, that is, more particularly, practice in reading, speaking, composing. Nor for this is the study of grammar necessary. What is necessary is a very large amount of practice; much reading, much speaking, much composing. The only use of grammar here is a negative one, namely, to correct mistakes. And for this negative purpose the only person in the grammar school who need know grammar is the teacher. The positive, scientific study of grammar must be reserved for the high school.

At present this sequence is not preserved. The result is confusion along the whole line of language work, and the loss of all good results. For grammar, being introduced at too early a period, is not apprehended. The grammar school graduates who enter the high school disclose a practically complete ignorance of grammar. The entire work of the grammar school in grammar is waste. The high school, in consequence, is called on to repair the blunder. And here another blunder follows. It is, indeed, the proper duty of the high school to teach grammar. But the high school does not realize this and make provision for it. When it finds itself called on to do what it feels the grammar school should have done, it makes no real room for the course in grammar, but grudgingly attaches the study of grammar to the study of literature. This blunder is fatal to each side. For grammar is a science, and demands scientific study. Work in grammar as an adjunct to work in literature fails to give the clear, scientific view which alone means apprehension. And the combination is disastrous to literature also. For thereby literature is led more than ever to subject itself to scientific treatment, and the study of literature for its own sake vanishes away. This mixture of grammar and literature together in the high school is one of the most flagrant instances of the confusion of aim.

Grammar and literature should, indeed, both be taught in the high school, but side by side, and not intermixed. If this were done, the study of grammar would find its proper place. But even then there would remain a great evil as the result of the introduction of grammar into the grammar school. For in this way the language study proper to the grammar school, — a study second to none in importance, and to be successfully pursued only in the grammar school,— is thrust out, neglected, and lost. Correctness in reading, speaking, composing, is nowhere attained. Ourvery colleges are full of English students who can neither read, speak, nor compose English. Instead, they are busy criticising Arnold and De Quincey, Tennyson and Browning! Certain colleges attempt to escape this anomalous disgrace by setting a universal entrance examination in English composition, and following it up, within the college gates, by a universal prescribed course. But the attempt comes too late. The faulty and hesitating use of English remains common, even in their upper classes. The only time to form correct habits of reading, speaking, composing, is before incorrect habits have been ingrained, that is, in the grammar school. But so long as the grammar school persists in trying to teach grammar, we shall remain, in speech and composition, ungrammatical.

Correctness in the use of language, and in a use that shall be fluent, is aim enough for one school along this line. From beginning to end the grammar school needs to devote itself to its attainment by daily practice in reading, in speaking, in composing, until ease and accuracy be won. And this attainment is worth while. It is better that our children, our men and women, read and speak and compose correctly, and remain ignorant of scientific grammar and of scientific criticism, than that, as they now are on the whole, they remain incorrect in reading, speech, and composition, and possessed of a grammatical and critical conceit.

Another evidence of loss of aim in the grammar school is found in its work in mathematics. Like its language study, the mathematics of the grammar school should aim at primary, universally necessary knowledge. This means, chiefly, facility in performing the fundamental operations. It is for this that ordinary life finds a universal use for mathematics. Yet this is what the grammar school refuses to give. It is too little concerned with life and its needs, and too much with an arithmetic which, to be scientifically complete, shall contain all the varieties of problems ever cunningly devised by clever arithmeticians. The result is that it is only an occasional grammar school graduate who can be relied upon to add a column of figures with certainty and despatch. What they most want of arithmetic, it has failed to give them.

Nor need it be imagined that the power for training the mind peculiar to arithmetic will go unused through confining it to the field of the useful, and forbidding its excursions off into the regions of the ingenious. The training which the mind asks of arithmetic at this period is facility, much practice in easy operations. Its profound and subtle powers do not develop until later, and the effort of the trick-problem to arouse them at this time is premature and harmful. Training in more difficult mathematical work must be left till later years, when the mind is ready, and when this will properly be afforded by algebra and geometry.

These are but illustrations of the grammar school’s need to ask itself the questions: What is the mark? and, How can it be reached ? As for the high school, it needs the same clarification of view. We have seen how it misses its aim in literature, being led astray by the prevailing tendency toward the slough of the prematurely scientific. Called upon here to awaken love, it has totally lost sense of its high calling. The formation of taste being with difficulty amenable to analysis and theory, it has been abandoned as unscientific; and the study of literature has undertaken in its stead training in dissection and accuracy, — things eminently scientific, and as eminently foreign to its proper and higher purposes. Analytic study of language for purposes of science should be disjoined from its synthetic study for purposes of taste, and left to a separate course. And, in general, the inculcation of accuracy should be left to the exacter sciences, such as logic and mathematics. These are sufficient for this end. But they will not give taste. If the aim of taste is to be crowded out of those studies fitted to attain it, where shall it come in ? Or are we, after all, to abandon taste, as something hardly scientific ?

Let us hope not. Let us hope that the study of English literature will some time awake to its high calling; that it will free itself from the shackles of scientific methods; that its teachers will desire, and school boards allow, the restoration of the aim of taste; and that its students will come to know what it is to read fine books for the love of them.

The study of literature, however, is not solitary in the error of its way. All cultural courses everywhere have suffered the loss of their proper aim. Of this Greek and Latin are notorious examples. Formerly prized as productive of fine taste and culture in their followers, they are now entirely turned over to the scientific machine. Their students no longer draw culture from them, and it is hardly to be doubted that the most of their followers to-day neither possess culture nor the power of ever getting any. The men of polish are no longer the men of the classics. And no wonder, for the classics are pursued nowadays for hardly anything but money. Nearly all their students are at them to get their living from teaching them. But the living is so meagre that first-rate men look elsewhere. Occasionally some bright man, who knows that a unique power for culture does lie in their study, rightly pursued, devotes himself, sacrifices himself, to them. But he dooms himself to loneliness. All he can do is to dream of the old days when the classics were a pursuit for gentlemen. But nowadays he finds that they are not known or studied as languages, but as so much dead material for grammatical analysis. Accuracy is indeed necessary in learning a language; and to its attainment analysis and grammar are essential. But only as steps to the single aim. At present it would seem that the high school has forgotten the aim and remained enmeshed in the means. Students who have had four successful years in Latin can parse and analyze (after a fashion) and recite rules from the grammar book. But give them a fresh page, and then watch their mental process! It is that of putting a puzzle together. Everything moves by conscious rule, nothing by spontaneous feeling. Properly speaking, they can neither read nor write. Is this knowing Latin as a language ? And as for liking it! The fond instructor dotes.

The inculcation of accuracy, — so loud a part of the despairing cry of Latin for attention, — is, we must admit, within its power. But there are three fatal objections against making it the paramount aim and justification of Latin in the high school. First, this aim, still more properly and efficaciously, is within the power of mathematics, and must be left, as the paramount and justifying aim, on the ethical side, to that study. Second, this aim, when it does enter into the study of Latin, belongs to a later stage, to the stage of analysis and theory, which must be preceded, in the high school, where Latin is begun, by the preliminary stage of observation and acquaintance. Third, the aim of accuracy must rest, from start to finish of the Latin course, subordinate to the more appropriate and higher aim of taste.

In a day like the present, when the need is to reduce the curriculum, — and, indeed, in every day, if a curriculum is to be rightly put together, — every study must justify its claim to inclusion by a unique power, must do, better than any other study, something admittedly worth doing. What, then, we ask, is the unique power of Latin ? In view of logic and mathematics, its claim to inculcate accuracy cannot set up to be unique. The whole treatment of Latin as a mere science, to which the linguistic of to-day, masquerading as philology, has degraded it, must, so far, at least, as beginners are concerned, be totally abandoned. The language must be taught as language, and find its justification in its revelation of the Roman race. This is the only thing admittedly worth doing which Latin does better than any other study. And the justification, how magnificent! To know the language as language, to familiarize the brain with its processes, so that it moves freely forward in them, is to give the mind new paths of thought, and paths that shall increase, in a manner that is unique, its power of thinking. And to know the spirit of the Romans is to know humanity in one of its very greatest incarnations; is to gain a view of life at an angle so widely divergent from our own that we obtain thereby an insight and an apprehension wholly new. But this mental process comes only when the brain is made to move through Latin as Latin; this new view of life comes only from familiarity with language and literature as language and literature; and neither shall ever, in the faintest hope, arise from the reduction of the language to mere material for grammar. Not, therefore, the distinction between the locative and ablative, not the traces of a middle voice, not the naming of hard-named metres, not, on the ethical side, the teaching of accuracy in grammar, — these are steps, but not aims; but rather a full inspiration of the Roman spirit, a deep mindgrowth by new processes of thought, an insight into life that is known as culture and taste.

With these instances of the high school’s loss of aim, — we might cite others, — let us pass on to the college. Here prescription’s barriers are down (or should be), and the field is widely open. Every student is conscious of two aims: to prepare for his vocation and to broaden his culture. He should have these aims in mind as distinctly two, and the college should aid him in keeping them distinct. They differ from each other, and require different treatment. A man preparing for medicine, for instance, may want a course in Horace to broaden his culture. At the same time, a man preparing to teach Latin may want a course in Horace to specialize his knowledge. The two courses cannot be the same. The cultural course aims to convey the Horatian spirit, and reads as Horace expected his verses to be read, without a thought of grammar, but for their meaning and their grace. But the vocational course (whose student must in every case have had the cultural course) aims to analyze the Horatian grammar, metre, style. To attempt to include the two aims in a single course, as is commonly done, is to confuse both. They cannot be made contemporaneous, for they are successive. The aim of analysis and theory cannot set in until a broad basis of observation and acquaintance has been laid. In a course of both together, little valuable analysis can be accomplished, and the student who wants it will be continually vexed by the intrusion of other matter. And as for the other side, the reading Horace as Horace, the gathering in of the Horatian flavor, — this, being the more delicate matter, generally escapes entirely before the rude onslaught of analysis.

In college, therefore, where the cultural subjects become material for vocational work, there must be, in every one, two separate courses: the pure cultural and the vocational-cultural, or, to use commoner terms, general and special. To all special courses, general courses, will be prerequisite. The specialist will have the general course first and the special course afterward. The general student will stop with the general course. Or, if he desire special work, for any reason, he may go on and take the special course. Thus no student will be deprived of special work, but every student will be given what he wants, and will know what he is getting. The proper sequence will be maintained, the distinction of aim recognized, the special course kept special, and the general course kept general.

Now the distinction in aim, resulting directly from the different desires of the student, should produce, parallel with the double lines of instruction, cultural and vocational, a double body of instructors, teachers, and investigators. The college has long recognized its two fields of work, —on the one hand to investigate the unknown, and on the other to teach the known. But, in its desire to extend the boundaries of learning, it seems to have forgotten that knowledge is not an end in itself, and that its acquisition has no ultimate defense save as it enters into the life of men at large. In its eagerness to secure good investigators, it has assumed, perhaps unconsciously, that good investigators make good teachers. This does not follow. These are two men, not one. The powers and interests of investigating are different from those of teaching, with which they rarely unite. Concerned with the remotest limits of his field, his brain busy night and day in chasing some elusive element or law, the investigator is out of touch with the general student, out of his range of interest and comprehension; he has quite forgotten where, on the long path of learning, the general student stands, and fails to make connection between the student and himself; he lectures on the advanced, minute points in which he is himself absorbed, and, as a lecturer for general students, he proves, honestly judged, a failure. The teacher, on the contrary, remains in close and sympathetic touch with the student, and knows exactly where he stands; he ponders continually how to reach him, to awaken, to inspire. Good teachers, then, make but mediocre investigators, and vice versa. Occasionally, indeed, some great man, combining many interests and many powers, is at once teacher and investigator in a high degree. He, then, is the educator par excellence. But he is rare. The average college may count itself rich if it possess one such. No college can depend upon his kind to fill its instructors’ list. It must make the fundamental recognition that the men are two. It must divide its force of instructors into two bodies. It must not require

— though it may allow — general teaching of its investigators, nor advanced investigation of its teachers. It must hold each group in equal honor. For the man who can take results, and select, order, and present them so as to interest and illumine,

— who can relate knowledge to life so as to elevate and inspire, —is not without his own value to the college and the state. A good teacher is worth a good investigator any day. But this, it would seem, is something college boards in founding chairs, and college presidents in filling them, at present need to learn.

As it is, no division of the instructing body is made. The teacher is required to give to mediocre investigation the time he wants for planning out his teaching. For nowadays the way — one might almost say the only way — to rise is to print investigations. Hence our college towns are full of young instructors sitting up late of nights, before countless slips of “collected cases,”tabulating nonsense. The investigator, on the other hand, is required to address general classes and give to mediocre teaching the time he wants for investigation. For there seems still to exist a tradition that the professor must lecture. Hence, once more, our colleges are full of learned investigators laboriously lecturing to yawning mouths.

Thus, to the intelligent, how many, oh, how many college lectures are become a bore! The stupid find them otherwise. For they — happy delusion! — imagine they are growing, must be growing, wise. To sit with spreading ears — even though they hear not — before such awesome learning, — this, to the blockhead, is education. Few lecturers, alas, know anything about lecturing. It is not lecturing to read off bibliographies. If every lecturer would first convince himself and his audience that there was some reason for his speaking rather than printing, there would be fewer lectures. The art of lecturing requires art. It requires — a thing unrecognized by science — personality. The college lecturer comes stoop-shouldered from his stack of indices, and recites the latest statistics; or he comes square-shouldered from the athletic field, and recites the latest stupidities. Statistics and stupidities are better in books. One may skip them. But the true lecturer, who knows how to lecture, who has something of his own to say, so intimate, so earnest, so personal, that to convey it all a book is insufficient, but he must say it with his own lips, looking in the faces of his students, — he no longer comes. Or, if he does, he comes discredited, uncertain of the tenure of his office; and it is only because he is either simple in his innocence or determined in his wisdom, that he continues to lecture, to believe in heart and character, in feeling and taste, in moral uplift and intellectual fire, in a world where the reigning gods want only facts. But the students know the difference. How refreshing to behold the cheerful sanity with which they avoid the pits that have been digged for them, and go their willful way! Where a true lecturer opens his doors, there they flock in. But soon the teeth of prescription seize them. They are forced to go here and there. And thus the bores also win an audience. A fact which accounts for their majority among those who insist upon prescription. As most college lectures go now, they are nothing but oral books. The men have vanished out of them. The typical college of to-day consists of a shrewd financier, libraries and their librarians, and laboratories and their laboratorians. Like the rest of the age, it is made up of money and matter. Machine-mad, we have gone far toward making education also a machine.

Is it not enough ? Shall we not make education once again to live? Shall we not maintain the order of learning, and insist that observation and acquaintance precede analysis and theory ? Shall we not count teaching worth as much as investigation, and honor the artistic equally with the scientific ? Side by side with skill, shall we not reinstate taste as an aim, and strive to make it a result ? While we retain the vocational course that is satisfied when the vocation is learned, shall we not resurrect the cultural course that is satisfied when mere culture is attained ? Shall we not acknowledge the fundamental distinction of goal, and the folly of trying to aim two divergent ways at once ? Shall we not, in other words, seek to make education hit the mark?