The early studies, I repeat, should be the studies that are at the root of all. These are the right studies for boys whose book-learning stops with the grammar school; they are equally right for boys who will in time. be doctors of philosophy. In the hands of a good teacher they are interesting, with no strain on truth; first, because to an awakened mind every study has its charm; and, next, because thru them a good teacher may train a boy to the enjoyment of vigorous work.

I am talking of intellectual work. Sewing for girls and carving for boys are first-rate things and may well be taught in public institutions; but they should not in an American grammar school crowd out intellectual opportunity. As to the hundred pretty and interesting things with which we are tempted to decorate school programs, let us remember that "the foundation must be stronger than the superstructure." 'Fine stockings, fine shoes, fine yellow hair," and a "double ruffle round her neck" did not make up in Ducky Dilver's lamented wife for the want of a petticoat; and it is even so with frills in education. Without the essential garments of the mind the frills may become a mockery.

Says Cardinal Newman :

I will tell you, gentlemen, what has been the practical error of the last twenty years [we must add many more years now]. Not to load the memory of the student with a mass of undigested knowledge; but to force upon him so much that he has rejected all. It has been the error of distracting and enfeebling the mind by an unmeaning profusion of subjects; of implying that a smattering in a dozen branches of study is not shallowness, which it really is, but enlargement, which it is not; of considering an acquaintance with the learned names of things and persons, and the possession of clever duodecimos, and attendance on eloquent lecturers, and membership with scientific institutions, and the sight of the experiments of a platform, and the specimens of a museum - that all this was not dissipation of mind, but progress. All things now are to be learned at once; not first one thing and then another; not one well, but many badly. Learning is to be without exertion, without attention, without toil, without grounding, without advance, without finish.

There are youths [says the same great writer] who certainly have a taste for reading, but in whom it is little more than the result of mental restlessness and curiosity. Such minds cannot fix their gaze on one object for two seconds together; the very impulse that leads them to read at all leads them to read on, and never to stay or hang over any one idea. The pleasurable excitement of reading what is new is their motive principle, and the imagination that they are doing something, and the boyish vanity that accompanies it, are their reward. Such youths often profess to like poetry, or to like history or biography; they are fond of lectures on certain of the physical sciences; or they may possibly have a real and true taste for natural history or other cognate subjects; and so far they may be regarded with satisfaction; but, on the other hand, they profess that they do not like logic, they do not like algebra, they have no taste for mathematics; which only means that they do not like application, they do not like attention, they shrink from the effort and labor of thinking, and the process of true intellectual gymnastics. The consequence will be that, when they grow up, they may, if it so happen, be agreeable in conversation; they may be well informed in this or that department of knowledge; they may be what is called literary; but they will have no consistency, steadiness, or perseverance; they will not be able to make a telling speech, or to write a good letter, or to fling in debate a smart antagonist, unless so far as, now

and then, mother-wit supplies a sudden capacity, which cannot be ordinarily counted on. They cannot state an argument or a question, or take a clear survey of a whole transaction, or give sensible and appropriate advice under difficulties, or do any of those things which inspire confidence and gain influence, which raise a man in life, and make him useful to his religion or his country.

Elsewhere Cardinal Newman says:

The displays of eloquence, or the interesting matter contained in their lectures, though admirable in themselves, and advantageous to the student at a later stage of his course, never can serve as a substitute for methodical and laborious teaching. A young man of sharp and active intellect, who has had no other training, has little to show for it besides a litter of ideas heaped up in his mind anyhow. He can utter a number of truths or sophisms, as the case may be; and one is as good to him as another. He is up with a number of doctrines and a number of facts; but they are all loose and straggling, for he has no principles set up in his mind round which to aggregate and locate them. He can say a word or two on half a dozen sciences, but not a dozen words on any one. He says one thing now, and another presently; and when he attempts to write down distinctly what he holds upon a point in dispute, or what he understands by its terms, he breaks down, and is surprised at his failure. He sees objections more clearly than truths, and can ask a thousand questions which the wisest of men cannot answer; and withal he has a very good opinion of himself, and is well satisfied with his attainments, and he declares against others, as opposed to the spread of knowledge altogether, who do not happen to adopt his ways of furthering it, or the opinions in which he considers it to result.

Still again:

But the intellect which has been disciplined to the perfection of its powers, which knows, and thinks while it knows, which has learned to leaven the dense mass of facts and events with the elastic force of reason, such an intellect cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be patient, collected, and majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every beginning, the origin in every end, the law in every interruption, the limit in each delay; because it ever knows where it stands, and how its path lies from one point to another.

Men look at any system of education, and are dissatisfied because no system does for everybody what education should do. They would gather grapes from thorns and figs from thistles. They forget that even the best seed may fall on stony ground or be eaten by the fowls of the air. They forget that no schoolmaster and no school system can make over a boy's ancestors, or banish his temptations, or give eyes to the blind; and they have their visions, their theories, their panaceas; and people rush after their panaceas as people rush after other panaceas, to find that the panacea comes and goes, while the disease abides; and the steadfast old teacher almost loses heart, like the steadfast old physician who sees people stake their money and their lives on a new patent medicine, on irrational healers of all sorts, on people who prescribe from examining locks of hair or from looking at the stars; but by and by he says to himself: "This, too, shall pass. Of the new teachers the dishonest will soon reveal themselves; and from the honestly mistaken some good may come. I will stand by a few things that I know. I know that it is better to concentrate the mind than to dissipate it, to train it than to pamper it. I know that there is no courage and no intellectual joy like the courage and

the joy of that effort which ends in mastery. New systems may come and go. I will take with gratitude whatever in any one of them adds beauty, interest, helpful variety, cultivating influence, any kind of strength or glory, to a task as perplexing as it is noble; yet not for one moment shall I forget that sound training comes before varied accomplishment; that there is no strength and no glory like that of duty steadily and bravely done."

DISCUSSION

DR WILLIAM T. HARRIS, United States Commissioner of Education.'-Being called out to make some remarks on the general subject of discussion, I shall utter some of the reflections which passed thru my mind as I listened to the fascinating paper which has just now been read.

The objection to the kindergarten which was quoted in the paper reminds me of forebodings which were often published thirty years ago in regard to the kindergarten when the first experiments were in progress in this country. I do not think, however, that experience verified those forebodings, for it would seem that, on the whole, the children from the kindergarten have a more highly developed power of interesting themselves in their regular work than those who have not received kindergarten training. They are, on an average, somewhat better able to help themselves. They do not depend upon the teacher quite so much as the others. It goes without saying that, while this is generally true, there are many exceptions. The difference caused by the training of a good kindergarten is often more than made up for by native talent, or by some species of training obtained in the experience which the child has found in his life; and it must be admitted that some kindergartens of a most unhappy sort have a tendency to develop in children the faculty of getting in the way of each other, and of needing constant supervision on the part of the teacher, who is obliged to interfere with their work.

Most of my reflections related to what the speaker said with reference to formal discipline. I recall vividly my protest in early life against formal discipline in the college. I was told that Latin and Greek were useful as disciplinary studies. In fact, the arguments made for Latin and Greek would seem to apply to Arabic and Sanscrit and languages of the Turanian tribes. I became thoroly tired of all this talk about mental discipline as secured thru the study of dead languages. But in later years I changed my view on this subject, and found that the study of Latin and Greek is generally of great value in one's education. In fact, there is no substitute for Latin and Greek so far as the Anglo-Saxon or any other Teutonic people is concerned, because Latin and Greek are the languages of the two classes of people who have furnished us the most valuable elements that enter our civilization. Our civilization is composite, getting one strand from Greece and one strand from Rome. The languages of those two nationalities belong to the culturestudies of our youth, because they help one to understand the two strands which enter his civilization from those sources. I invented the expression "embryology of civilization" to make clear this thought. Inasmuch as one has to study an animal in its embryology in order to know it scientifically, so, it seemed to me, one has to study his own civilization in its embryology in order to understand it. But I will readily admit that the study of Latin and Greek remains in some instances only a study of embryos, without furnishing valuable concrete results, without strengthening the youth to grapple with the problems of life as they are now. I have seen students at Oxford and Cambridge, resident graduates at those venerable institutions, who had devoted so much time to the embryology of civilization that no leisure or taste remained for the study of the civilization which had hatched out of those embryos.

I Revised and extended by the author.

It seems to me that it is a mistake to claim for the study of Latin and Greek a value simply as a mental discipline, for a thoro study of Spanish, or French, or German, or Arabic, or Chinese would develop an equal or greater amount of mental discipline. And hence the modern school might use one of those branches as a substitute for Latin and Greek; but no one of those branches could give the youth an insight into the development of his civilization; he would not be mentally prepared to understand the Roman contribution nor the Greek contribution to the laws and usages of civil society and to the forms of literature and art and science.

This may be taken as a counter-statement to the position set forth by Dean Briggs in his paper. But I had in my own mind a general assent to all that he said, and I was very glad to hear what he said. My suggestion is only that more stress should be laid on the fitness of the college studies to prepare the person for thinking out the problems of later life, and not so much merely on the formal discipline; that is to say, on the mere training of the will to industry. I think that this will be apparent when one considers that mere dogged industry in some branches does not produce the effects that the same industry produces in others. The one who studies Latin and Greek has more insight into human nature as revealed in his own civilization than the one does who devotes his life to the study of the native dialects of the Sandwich Islands. The one who learns the nigher mathematics has more insight into the laws that control matter and forces in nature than the one who devotes himself exclusively to manual training, but with equally stubborn industry. So, too, the industrious athlete at college does not acquire an ability to combine the human forces of an army of men into an all-conquering unity so much as the study of the branches taught at West Point would do. It is true that Wellington learned to conquer at Waterloo, as he said, from his early experience in the football game at Eton, but it was at the military college that he learned the mathematical principles which gave him an insight into the football game and enabled him to understand how to apply the principles involved in the combination of the football rush on the grand scale of the field of Waterloo.

I have always felt some degree of impatience with my college teachers because they did not impress upon us students the true view in regard to the studies which we pursued — they did not interpret them in the light of civilization. I had accidentally heard something of German philosophy. There was at one American college in the early fifties professors with some insight into the great revolution going on in German thinking; a revolution which was inaugurated by the publication of the great Critique of Kant; some insight, I would say, into the upheaval in German thinking which lasted for fifty years or so, namely, until after 1830. This revolution involved not only new insights into all realms of intellect, but also revolutions in statecraft and productive industry. For German thought introduced comparative methods, not only into philosophy and natural science, but also into the study of national economy and civil service. Its far-reaching revolutions became visible to all the world on the fields of Königgrätz and Sedan, and later they can now be seen in the specialization of German industry, by which the northern nations have learned how to emancipate themselves from a dependence on the tropical population for sugar.

The most important thing, perhaps, is the study of comparative religion, inaugurated by the new German studies in philosophy. But seventy years after the publication of Kant's Critique there was only one professor in an American college who possessed an insight into the work sufficient to explain it to a class of students; or, indeed, to advise an earnest-minded young man as to a course of reading on the subject.

I mention this because I think that the narrow view of formal discipline was the cause of this scandalous neglect of philosophy. For not only was German philosophy neglected, but the ancient Greek philosophy fared no better. Very absurd notions prevailed as to the doctrines taught by Plato and Aristotle, and as to their relations to each other. I have always considered it a piece of good fortune to me that I revolted against

formal disciplinary studies and struck out for myself with the vague ambition to master the philosophy of the Germans; a philosophy so difficult that after many months' study I could not tell what any page of it meant.

I hasten to say, in closing, that I admit that there is much good in mere industry and in the discipline of exerting one's will so as to conquer at a piece of work, at the blacksmith's forge, or the carpenter's bench, or in the college boat-race, or in the study of the language of a savage tribe, or in a game of chess; but I wish to affirm that there is great virtue in the branches that form the regular course of study in the college or university. They afford insight as well as discipline.

THE SITUATION AS REGARDS THE COURSE OF STUDY

PROFESSOR JOHN DEWEY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Horace Mann and the disciples of Pestalozzi did their peculiar missionary work so completely as intellectually to crowd the conservative to the wall. For half a century after their time the ethical emotion, the bulk of exhortation, the current formulæ and catchwords, the distinctive principles of theory have been found on the side of progress, of what is known as reform. The supremacy of self-activity, the symmetrical development of all the powers, the priority of character to information, the necessity of putting the real before the symbol, the concrete before the abstract, the necessity of following the order of nature and not the order of human convention — all these ideas, at the outset so revolutionary, have filtered into the pedagogic consciousness and become the commonplace of pedagogic writing and of the gatherings where teachers meet for inspiration and admonition.

It is, however, sufficiently obvious that, while the field of theory and enthusiasm and preaching was taken possession of by the reformer, the conservative, so far as the course of study is concerned, was holding his own pretty obstinately in the region of practice. He could afford to neglect all these sayings; nay, he could afford to take a part in a glib reiteration of the shibboleths, because, as a matter of fact, his own work remained so largely untouched. He retained actual control of school conditions; it was he who brought about the final and actual contact between the theories and the child. And by the time the ideals and theories had been translated over into their working equivalents in the curriculum, the difference between them and what he as a conservative really wished and practiced became often the simple difference between tweedle dum and tweedle dee. So the "great big battle" was fought with mutual satisfaction, each side having an almost complete victory in its own field. Where the reformer made his headway was not in the region of studies, but rather in that of methods and atmosphere of school work.

In the last twenty or twenty-five years, however, more serious attempts have been made to carry the theory into effective execution in the schoolroom, in subject-matter as well as method. The unconscious insincerity.