the development of virile intellectual power, a thing which simply cannot grow without exercise.

This is a matter which goes far below the question of one or another plan of studies, tho it is greatly affected by the relative wisdom or unwisdom of what the student is offered. If he finds a course which impels him and his comrades to regular effort day by day, and also gives him the immense help that comes to all young men of ordinary abilities from moving together with their fellows in the same direction, his progress in studies is part of the orderly advance of a march, with little chance for straggling or loitering. If he is confused by failure to discover that there is a rational order of studies, or that his college believes there is at least some preferable order for the mass of students, he thus loses much or all of a kind of help he ought to have. If the educated experience of his college cannot tell him, at least approximately, what things he ought to take, and some definite things which all college students ought to take, how is he to find out with any strong probability that he is going straight on the right road? Those who are ready to move an indefinite distance along any of the diverging directions of elective freedom may well pause to ask whether the keen words of Descartes on progress in knowledge are not worth heeding in this connection: "It is better to go a short distance on the right road than a long distance on the wrong one."

The love of freedom from control and of pleasure in our labor are splendid things. They are at once the charm and peril of student effort. The true freedom of the human spirit is the true end of the college course. This is not injured, however, by creating places where students may go, if they will, and where they must take some subjects of study which experience shows to be eminently fitted in their combination to serve this very end. We are asking simply for some of the central truths of literature, science, and philosophy, what Locke called the "teeming truths, rich in store, with which they furnish the mind, and, like the lights of heaven, are not only beautiful and entertaining in themselves, but give light and evidence to other things that without them could not be seen or known." And as for the element of pleasure, why should we not desire it? How exquisitely did Aristotle say: "Pleasure perfects labor, even as beauty crowns youth." Not the idle pleasure, however, but the achieved pleasure, the deep pleasure that comes from noble mastery, from winning on the hard-fought field of athletics of the mind, and, above all, from winning in the fight against intellectual sloth and easygoing indulgence-this is the crown of our best young college manhood.

A few words must suffice to set forth another peril which especially besets us at this time. It is the peril of confusion in college counsels. It Of the Conduct of the Human Understanding, 43.

2 Ethics, X, 4, 8.

has been inevitable because of the extreme diversity of educational conditions in our land and because of conflicting theories of college training.

The pole of law and the pole of freedom are the two contrasted standpoints, with many a halting-place between. It is clear that any attempt to cast all our colleges in one mold is foredoomed to failure. We must seek some other remedy. But if the present confusion cannot be cured, the colleges will be seriously and permanently weakened. at least we must do something, and do it soon. The colleges must at all events do one thing, and that is to make as clear as possible what it is they are severally seeking to accomplish. Certain very practical questions need to be answered. They are questions of the substance and aim of liberal education.

One of the questions is: Should a college exact a substantial amount of prescribed study for its degree? If so, there is room to organize one or more bachelor's degrees according to the types now slowly, tho imperfectly, evolving in our time. If not, the free elective plan with one bachelor's degree is the true alternative. There are many halting-places between, but none of them is a resting-place. Here, then, is a basis of clear division without confusion, and one that plain folk can understand. The nature of the answer given will depend on whether or not a given college believes that there are substantial studies above the stage of our preparatory schooling which are essential to the best liberal education. Intermediate or minimizing positions on this question will result in corresponding vagueness and uncertainty in organization, and will tend to perpetuate the confusion. It is worth sacrificing something, even in a transitional stage, for the sake of the assured gain that accrues to a welldefined plan. If it turns out to be a wrong plan, its defects become visible sooner and may be more promptly amended.

course.

Let us ask a second question: Is there or is there not a proper field of college studies, exclusive of the fields of secondary, technical, and professional learning? If so, such studies alone should constitute the college If not, studies from the other fields may be brought in. It will not do to say no sharp line can be drawn between fields of education for the reason that the domain of knowledge is one and all knowledge is liberalizing. Follow this out consistently, and important distinctions, needed to effect a working scheme of division for the parts of educa tion, are obscured. We may distinguish between great regions, even tho we are unable to settle all boundary disputes. There are enough college studies of undisputedly and eminently liberal character to fill the college course to repletion. Let those who believe this organize accordingly, and let those who believe that any respectable study possible to students of college age may be put in the college course put such studies in. The two kinds of colleges will then be distinctly discernible.

If the college is to prevail, the confusion, tho not necessarily a division of counsels, must cease. The two opposing tendencies indicate the two available lines for at least making the division clear to the country at large. Intermediate positions are unstable and transitional. They make confusion. What parents, teachers, and students need to know as definitely as possible is precisely what it is a given college stands for. Uncertainty here breeds loss of confidence in liberal education. It is to be hoped that most of the colleges will be able to stand together. If they do, I hope and believe they will stand for the conviction that there are college studies essential for all who take the college course; that it is the completion of these which opens to the student the best all-around view of the knowledge most serviceable for his whole after-life; and that the ideas of discipline and duty, in studies as well as in conduct, underlie any real development of the one true freedom of the human spirit.

THE OPPORTUNITY AND FUNCTION OF THE
SECONDARY SCHOOL

CALVIN M. WOODWARD, DEAN OF SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, ST. LOUIS, MO.

The curriculum of the secondary school must be broadened. The demand for it comes from new constituencies with increasing emphasis every year. Secondary education is rapidly becoming universal, and its form and content must take into account new fields of activity for educated people. The curriculum must adapt itself to modern requirements. It must touch modern life, modern conditions, modern forces, modern responsibilities. As Huxley expressed it, "It is folly to continue, in this age full of modern artillery, to train our boys to do battle in it equipped only with the sword and shield of the ancient gladiator." Sir Lyon Playfair changed the figure in protesting against the English system of secondary education, as follows: "In a scientific age and in an industrial section, an exclusive education in the dead languages is a curious anomaly. The flowers of literature should indeed be cultivated, but it is not wise to send men into our fields of industry to reap the harvest, when they have been taught to pick the poppies and push aside the wheat."

When the wide-awake, inquisitive boy knows that electricity, and steam, and heat, and the art of designing and constructing machines, can be studied and understood with no more effort and in less time than it takes to commit to memory a Latin grammar, or to read Demosthenes without a dictionary, and that those former things are ten times as interesting as the latter, and a hundred times as likely to be of service to him in the struggle for life and the battle for success-he will choose them, if he has a chance. And it is our business to give him a chance.

We want living languages and living issues. We must teach the duties of an American citizen rather than the manner of life of a slaveowner in Athens or Babylon; not merely what may be the solace and delight of a man of leisure, but what will increase his value and use in practical affairs. We must teach the mechanics, hydraulics, electricity, and chemistry of today, rather than the doctrines and fallacies of Aristotle and the alchemists. We must illustrate and explain the battle of Santiago, rather than the battle of Salamis. It is a thousand times more interesting and more useful to the average boy to know how modern engineers tunneled under the Alps, than to read the fabulous stories of how Hannibal made a road over them; to know how Eads built a railway bridge across the Mississippi, than to decipher Caesar's foot-bridge over the Rhine; to analyze and comprehend the waterworks of Boston, St. Louis, or London, than the hydraulic system of ancient Rome, marvelous as it was; to master the universal language of drawing, than to get a smattering of a language which no one speaks and no one writes; to become familiar with modern methods of construction and the skillful use of tools and machinery, than to speculate over the tower of Babel or the pyramids of Egypt. As Emerson said, we must take the step from knowing to doing, and we must teach the rising generation to do the things that the world today wants done.

Here is the magnificent opportunity for the secondary school; to use a military phrase, let it change front and face the world of today. Let it open all its doors and windows to the humanities of today. Look around and look forward, not always backward. Weep not, as Ruskin did, for departed days, for the lumbering stagecoach, the storm-driven wooden. ships, the hand-loom, the log-hut, and the good old days of blissful feudalism. I am amazed when I think how much we are spellbound by tradition. Perhaps I have been as foot-loose as any of you, yet I find myself continually approving of educational features for no good reason except that they are fashionable. We somehow seem to think it means far more and is in far better form to know that certain nymphs gave a Greek hero a helmet which Vulcan made for Pluto, and which rendered him invisible, than to know that Thomas A. Edison invented the incandescent lamp and made it possible for Niagara Falls to light a whole city with it, twenty-five miles away; and yet we don't believe one word of the former story, while we accept every word of the latter.

It is, of course, a matter of association. Sir Lecester Deadlock, in Bleak House, could not endure a man who experimented with a steam engine and who seemed quite at home with a coal-burning furnace. He drew inferences as you and I do. Sir Lecester inferred that the man who understood engines and power-houses must be ignorant of polite learning and unfamiliar with the ways of good society. So you jump to the conclusion that the man who knows all about Edison and the generation of

electricity by a waterfall is probably ignorant of Greek mythology and not very proficient in spelling.

Well, perhaps you are right and perhaps you are wrong. But this is certain it is no longer safe to assume that your engineer or your electrician is an uneducated man, or that he lacks culture. There is more than one kind of culture. Emerson speaks of "having a mechanical craft for culture." By "culture" I mean a knowledge of some of the best things that have been said and done in the world; a certain refined and gracious spirit; a soul of honor; a depth of human sympathy; a wise and understanding heart; an all-pervading love for what is useful and true, and therefore good and beautiful. That kind of culture can be gained with or without much ancient literature; with or without much mathematics; with or without the physical, biological, or dynamic laboratory; with or without the art-room or the drafting-room; with or without the theory of typical tools and correct methods of construction. But there is no necessary divorce between the skilled hand and the cultured mind; both are needed for the highest culture.

President Woodrow Wilson says that the colleges are not planned for the majority; they are for the minority. When we consider colleges of the Princeton type, we must admit that he is right. They are not for the majority. So of the classical secondary school; it is not for the majority, and the majority know it and feel it.

I am not pleading tonight for the minority who are already in our secondary and higher schools. I am pleading for that vast majority who are not in them, who need and desire education, and who are coming in increasing numbers. The program which the majority want is fairly well. known. It is in force in many cities; it is embodied in the manualtraining high school; and it has been met with a hearty response. I need not quote St. Louis to prove this. The Manual -Training High School of Kansas City has doubled the high-school attendance of the city in six years. Similar results have been reached in other cities. The technical college or school of engineering logically follows this new kind of high school. It takes equal rank with the traditional college, and it will soon outstrip it in attendance.

When Hawthorne got thru college he wrote to his mother: "I cannot become a physician and live by men's diseases; I cannot be a lawyer and live by their quarrels ; I cannot be a clergyman and live by their sins. I suppose there is nothing for me to do but write books."

Now, the majority who are coming will inherit no wealth; they expect and desire to earn their own living. We do not need them as lawyers, or ministers, or doctors; we hope they won't all write books; but we do. need them as teachers, as engineers, as accomplished workmen in our industries and in our unhistorical methods of trade and commerce. Let us persuade them that education and skill dignify and adorn and enrich