For it at once appears that on the one side there are vast ranges of information which have virtually no significance for the purposes of a liberal education, while on the other hand there are certain elements so fundamental and vital that without any one of them a liberal education is impossible.

2I should like to indicate certain parts of human knowledge which seem to me so essential that no principle of election should ever be allowed to drive them out of the course of any college student.

2 First, a student should become acquainted with the fundamental motives and purposes and beliefs which, clearly, or unclearly recognized, underlie all human experience and bind it together. He must perceive the moral strivings, the intellectual endeavors, the esthetic experiences of his race, and closely linked with these, determining and determined by them, the beliefs about the world which have appeared in our systems of religion. To investigate this field, to bring it to such clearness of formulation as may be possible, is the task of philosophy-an essential element in any liberal education. Secondly, as in human living, our motives, purposes, and beliefs have found expression in institutions, those concerted modes of procedure by which we work together, a student should be made acquainted with these. He should see and appreciate what is intended, what accomplished, and what left undone by such institutions as property, the courts, the family, the church, the mill. To know these as contributing and failing to contribute to human welfare is the work of our social or humanistic sciences, into which a boy must go on his way through the liberal college. Thirdly, in order to understand the motives and the institutions of human life one must know the conditions which surround it, the stage on which the game is played. To give this information is the business of astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, biology and the other descriptive sciences. These a boy must know, so far as they are significant and relevant to his purpose. Fourthly, as all three of these factors, the motives, the institutions, the natural processes have sprung from the past and have come to be what they are by change upon change in the process of time,

the student of human life must try to learn the sequence of events from which the present has come. The development of human thought and attitude, the development of human institutions, the development of the world and of the beings about us-all these must be known, as throwing light upon present problems, present instrumentalities, present opportunities in the life of human endeavor. And in addition to these four studies which render human experience in terms of abstract ideas, a liberal education must take account of those concrete representations of life which are given in the arts, and especially in the art of literature. It is well that a boy should be acquainted with his world not simply as expressed by the principles of knowledge but also as depicted by the artist with all the vividness and definiteness which are possible in the portrayal of individual beings in individual relationships. These five elements, then, a young man must take from a college of liberal training, the contributions of philosophy, of humanistic science, of natural science, of history, and of literature. So far as knowledge is concerned, these at least he should have, welded together in some kind of interpretation of his own experience and of the world in which he lives.

My second suggestion is that our college curriculum should be so arranged and our instruction so devised that its vital connection with the living of men should be obvious even to an undergraduate. A little while ago I heard one of the most prominent citizens of this country speaking of his college days, and he said, "I remember so vividly those few occasions on which the professor would put aside the books and talk like a real man about real things." Oh, the bitterness of those words to the teacher! Our books are not dealing with the real things, and for the most part we are not real men either, but just old fogies and bookworms. And to be perfectly frank about the whole matter, I believe that in large measure our pupils are indifferent to their studies simply because they do not see that these are important.

Now if we really have a vital course of study to present I believe that this difficulty can in large measure be overcome.

It is possible to make a freshman realize the need of translating his experience from the forms of feeling to those of ideas. He can and he ought to be shown that now, his days of mere tutelage being over, it is time for him to face the problems of his people, to begin to think about those problems for himself, to learn what other men have learned and thought before him; in a word, to get himself ready to take his place among those who are responsible for the guidance of our common life by ideas and principles and purposes. If this could be done, I think we should get from the reality-loving American boy something like an intellectual enthusiasm, something of the spirit that comes when he plays a game that seems to him really worth playing. But I do not believe that this result can be achieved without a radical reversal of the arrangement of the college curriculum. I should like to see every freshman at once plunged into the problems of philosophy, into the difficulties and perplexities about our institutions, into the scientific accounts of the world especially as they bear on human life, into the portrayals of human experience which are given by the masters of literature. If this were done by proper teaching, it seems to me the boy's college course would at once take on significance for him; he would understand what he is about; and though he would be a sadly puzzled boy at the end of the first year, he would still have before him three good years of study, of investigation, of reflection, and of discipleship, in which to achieve, so far as may be, the task to which he has been set. Let him once feel the problems of the present, and his historical studies will become significant; let him know what other men have discovered and thought about his problems, and he will be ready to deal with them himself. But in any case, the whole college course will be unified and dominated by a single interest, a single purpose, that of so understanding human life as to be ready and equipped for the practice of it. And this would mean for the college, not another seeking of the way of quick returns, but rather an escape from aimless wanderings in the mere by-paths of knowledge, a resolute climbing on the high road to a unified grasp upon human experience.

2- have taken so much of your time this morning that an apology seems due for the things I have omitted to mention. I have said nothing of the organization of the college, nothing of the social life of the students, nothing of the relations with the alumni, nothing of the needs and qualifications of the teachers, and even within the consideration of the course of study, nothing of the value of specialization or of the disciplinary subjects or of the training in language and expression. And I have put these aside deliberately, for the sake of a cause which is greater than any of them-a cause which lies at the very heart of the liberal college. It is the cause of making clear to the American people the mission of the teacher, of convincing them of the value of knowledge: not the specialized knowledge which contributes to immediate practical aims, but the unified understanding which is Insight.

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND PRACTICE IN WRITING

1. Take issue with, or defend, the view that the teacher is the one best qualified to give opinion on matters of educational practice. 2. Explain the difference between a liberal college and a technical or a professional school. Illustrate by well-known institutions. 3. Show how the student activities of college life may contribute to the training which is the object of the college. 4. "Apart from some of the experiences of friendship and sympathy I doubt if there are any human interests as permanently satisfying, so fine and splendid in themselves, as are those of intellectual activity" (page 39). Discuss friendship, sympathy, and intellectual activity as the three great human experiences. Should any others be added to them? 5. Compare the views on specialization expressed in this selection with those expressed in the selection, Specialization, page 145. 6. How satisfactory is the statement of the five "elements" (page 49) which the student of the liberal college should have as the constituents of his course? 7. Select some study which you think should have reality for you but which you have found to lack this quality in your experience with it. Indicate what your difficulties have been.

THE NEW DEFINITION OF THE CULTIVATED MAN 1

CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT

[Charles William Eliot (1834-) has been one of the foremost figures in American education for a great many years. During the larger part of his career as an educator, he was president of Harvard College, retiring in 1909 as president emeritus. He has written widely on educational topics, and has exerted a powerful influence in the shaping of the tendencies of American education of the present. This selection was delivered originally as a presidential address before the National Education Association.]

To produce the cultivated man, or at least the man capable of becoming cultivated in after-life, has long been supposed to be one of the fundamental objects of systematic and thorough education. The ideal of general cultivation has been one of the standards in education. It is often asked: Will the education which a given institution is supplying produce the cultivated man? Or, Can cultivation be the result of a given course of study? In such questions there is an implication that the education which does not produce the cultivated man is a failure, or has been misconceived, or misdirected. Now, if cultivation were an unchanging ideal, the steady use of the conception as a permanent test of educational processes might be justified; but if the cultivated man of to-day is, or ought to be, a distinctly different creature from the cultivated man of a century ago, the ideal of cultivation cannot be appealed to as a standard without preliminary explanations and interpretations. It is the object of this paper to show that the idea of cultivation in the highly trained human being has undergone substantial changes during the nineteenth century.

I ought to say at once that I propose to use the term "cultivated man" in only its good sense-in Emerson's sense. In this paper, he is not to be a weak, critical, fastidious creature,

1 Reprinted by permission of the author and by special arrangement with the publishers from Education for Efficiency (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.).