time of eating would be saved and energy set free for a new upward march of culture greater even than that caused by 510 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE cooking and the control of fire which the legend of Prometheus marks. It is now often painful to set limits to science, and results as surprising as all these may emerge in the future, but they will be different and by yet undiscovered methods. Once beneficent, college entrance requirements, as now enforced in some parts of our country and in some respects, are almost an unmitigated curse to high schools, exploiting them against their normal interests and the purpose of the people who sup- port them, and thus perverting their natural development, en- forcing artifacts of both method and matter, and sacrificing the interests of the vast majority who will never go to college.
This invasion and subjection has been rendered plausible even to its victims by three extraordinary fallacies, (a) The Committee of Ten " unanimously declare that every subject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil so long as he pursues it, no matter what the probable destination of the pupil may be or at what point his education is to cease." This is a masterpiece of college policy. But in the first place this principle does not apply to the great army of incapables, shading down to those who should be in schools for dul- lards or subnormal children, for whose mental development heredity decrees a slow pace and early arrest, and for whom by general consent both studies and methods must be different. To refuse this concession to the wide range of individual differences is a specious delusion, which in a democracy may be perfectly honest. Difficulties must be omitted, the interest of the hour more appealed to, illustrations multi- plied, and different beginnings, means, and goals early sought. Nor does this principle, of course, apply to geniuses. The school is not constructed for such. They go by leaps and find their own way. We must consider, then, only pupils that lie between these extremes.
Again, this is unknown in other lands, where it would bring the direst confusion. European systems seem constructed on the converse prin- ciple that subjects should be approached in as many different ways as there are ultimate goals, while choices between academic and other careers are made before the teens, and methods and matter in the same topics diverge increasingly up the grades. The courses in Eng- lish public secondary schools differ as much in method from those of the great endowed fitting schools as they do in matter. So the gym- nasia and Real schools differ from each other, and both still more from the Volk schools, and as do the lycee and polytechnic schools in France, while text-books on the same subject are radically different. Besides the distinction between those destined for technical and professional careers and those who study for culture purposes, there are many species and varieties of difference. Again, in the vast number of monotechnic, polytechnic, commercial, and other courses, some of the INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 5*1 departments of physics and chemistry, which are of immediate appli- cation, are emphasized. The horological school course emphasizes vibrations; the great lithograph school of Vienna lays stress upon light, and that in certain aspects; the schools of telegraphy, upon elec- tricity; those of wine culture, upon the chemistry of fermentation; those of agriculture, upon the practical problems of chemistry involved in fertilization; secondary schools for art, upon the geometry con- nected with perspective; those for the lower order of engineering, upon mechanics; and so on indefinitely, all selecting those parts and principles, and even sub-aspects and methods, from the fields of these great sciences that lie nearest to and shed most light upon practise, and with comparatively little matter in common with some sciences. With all this precious development the principle of the Committee of Ten would make havoc, lacking as it does all proper conception of the magnitude of each science and its vast variety of approaches. In topics like astronomy and physics, even the question where to begin the mathematical side, how much stress to lay upon it, or whether to omit it entirely, like Tyndall, is largely a problem of destination.
Even in teaching jnodern languages there are recognized differ- ences of both method and matter, whether the pupil needs to be taught chiefly and first to speak and hear the language or to read and command its literary resources. Geography might almost be called in its best modern development the introduction to various sciences, and I think there is now general agreement that much more stress should be laid upon it for those who finish their education early than for those who continue. So in English, children who leave school early have, as we saw above, an inalienable right to some knowledge, slight though it be, of the general moral lessons of the great masterpieces which those who go on have other means of attaining. Who would say that if a child has six months or one year to learn what the Latin or Greek world really means, he should begin as the pupil would who is to specialize in these topics later? Not only thus does this principle fail to recognize how vast as the mind itself the great departments ot knowledge are, but how the pedagogic instinct almost inclines to the belief that there are perhaps almost as many ways of approach to them as there are minds, and that it would not be an insanely wild thesis for those not ignorant of the anthropology of youth to maintain that every individual mind has ideally its own best personal way of ap- proach to every science, because each mind not only has, but is, its own method. There is especially the great fundamental distinction between those approaches that begin with practise, art, skill, and in- dustry or for those who are motor-minded, into whom the great func- tion of the teacher is to instil as much scientific knowledge and as many principles as can be made of practicable service, and the professional and the other culture groups who can follow a logical order. In looking over the text-books for these two kinds of minds or " destinations," one is struck with the very limited amount of subject-matter which is common, and also with the fact that these differences rest on funda- 512 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE mental differences of constitution, and that to force them into one mold would be wasteful, undemocratic, and pedagogically immoral. This principle ignores the fact that the average youth of high school age, and especially in the early teens, has not so far reached the age of reason that logical methods can be made supreme, but that genetic methods which cross-section it must also be largely relied on. Some need far more popular science or can not depart from utilities. But minds destined to high development grasp and follow the order and logic of science far earlier than others. In general the more vigorous and capable of high development is an adolescent mind, the less appeal is needed to this kind of interest — i. e., the smaller the mental area necessary to cultivate, to generate interest in the great spring of mind. The female intellect, in general, is far more in need of this, and develops specialized and abstract interest later than that of the average boy.
(b) Closely associated with this is the principle that " all subjects are of equal educational value if taught equally well." This, too, has been reiterated until with some it has almost become a dogma. It is especially startling to those who have accepted the Herbartian view of grades of culture values, for it means that in themselves and when rightly taught, shorthand, Greek, agriculture, mathematics, sewing and surveying, elocution and drawing, the humanities and science, pure and applied knowledge, and all the newest as well as the oldest branches, if taught alike well, have equal educational worth. Here, too, the counter assertion that no two topics have or can ever be given equal culture value is probably somewhat nearer the truth. Were the above precept sound, the supreme desideratum in the world would be good pedagogic methods, for they would be all that is necessary to transform the meanest bread-winning to the best culture topic. A great teacher-scholar has sometimes made the world seem to pivot on a new species or a Greek particle, but this art can never make these themes rank with, e. g., evolution, the renaissance, religion, or mathe- matics, even if poorly taught. The history of education is rich in warnings, but I can recall no fallacy that so completely evicts content and enthrones form. If true, the greatest educational battles from the Greeks to the present time have been fought for naught, and seas of pedagogic ink will have been spilled in vain.
(c) Another related surd that has acquired wide vogue and wrought only mischief is that fitting for college is essentially the same as fitting for life. Indeed, life, it is said, is preparing for an examina- tion. The lawyer crams for his cases; the doctor for his critical trials; the business man for crises. Life itself is an examination. Therefore, that state of man where he is fitting for college is really the best school for life. This involves the colossal assumption that the college has so adjusted itself to the demands of the world as it now is, that the old maxim — non vita sed scholar discimus — presents an antithesis which no longer exists, and the schools and teachers that complain that they must fit for college rather than fit for life are non- INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 5*3 suited. This would be true if, e. g., the high school best fitted the vast majority who now leave to do so with least loss and with the greatest advantage at any point during or at the end of the course, for this would, in present conditions, be the greatest good for the greatest number. But this would involve the radical revolution of beginning every topic with its practical, industrial, or applied side, and reserving pure science of every kind till the last. If this be the ideal and ulti- mate system, colleges are farthest from and will be the last to accept it. Here the counter assertion is that to fit for present entrance ex- aminations involves an at least temporary unfitting for life. It is too sedentary, clerical, bookish, and noetic, and above all, arbitrary and by an alien master who offers at best only a limited range of choices, all of which may fail to appeal to the best powers of youth. Life is not coaching nor cramming, and very few of its tests consist in get- ting up subjects and writing them, while too many examinations stunt and clog, and if too prolonged, make real life seem tenuous and afar because it lacks the vital element of decision and application.
Again, in one of the most important of recent educational books, Demolins 1 urges that; an education which fits for life in existing insti- tutions is bad and must fail because it makes men tuft-hunters, place- seekers, searchers for soft snaps, takes out the blood and iron of their nature, and he demands an education that fits for nothing, for only that is truly liberal, in a way that suggests Lowell's definition of a university as a place where nothing useful is taught. For him it should exhaust all the possibilities of the present and overflow natu- rally into the future. It is filled with an ideal of what Mr. Kidd calls projected efficiency. Its sentiments preform history. Those who es- cape bondage to past and present alike and who are best fitted for life want, no matter with what degree or at what stage their appren- ticeship ends — every man Jack of them — to go out into the world and make careers for themselves. They go West, to the colonies, the slums; devise new enterprises, sometimes almost want to peasantize themselves and fall in love with wheel-grease and the smell of the barnyard; want to sweep the office and run on errands; their instinct to be fundamental impels them to start so low that they can sink no lower, so that every change must be a rise. | Academic enervation and anemia is seen when youth desire simply to fit for ready-madej positions instead of striking out new ones. Napoleon organized the schools of France to give him civil servants, and the incubus of the French educational system, which all the best teachers of that land now deplore, is that the young baccalaureate and his parents have from the first only a snug little berth in view, and those who fail of this low kind of success eat their hearts out. Their parents, instead of wanting to see them safely housed and married to a dot, should cut the navel-string and toss them out into the current, to sink or swim according to their merit. One college graduate of this mettle wagered THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE that he would start naked in a hotel bathroom and, unaided, pay his way around the world and return in one year with $5,000, and won his wager. With academic wealth comes taste for luxury, enervation, distaste for strenuosity, taste for pemmican courses, the habit of dawdling, and in the end the realizing sense that one has been born just too late and has spent his life in trying to make up the lost quarter of an hour.1 Education should cease to fit for the past that its gradu- ates should, in Sturm's ideal, be at home if transported to ancient Greece or Rome. Nor should it be content to fit for the present, which will all too soon be an emeritus deity. This enthusiasm for a larger future alone banishes ennui and disenchantment. This is fitting for life, but it is not fitting for college or even for present times.
These three so-called principles thus turn out to be only clever recruiting precepts, special pleas of able advocates hold- ing briefs for the college rather than the judicial decisions of educational statesmanship. The strategists of this policy urge that social classes are favored by European schools, and that it is an American idea of unique value that every boy should as long as possible feel that he is on the high road to the bache- lor's degree and will reach it, if he does not stop, just as we teach that he may become president, but they ignore the fact that there are as great differences in natural ability as those artificially created in any aristocracy, and that the very life of a republic depends on bringing these out, in learning how to detect betimes, and give the very best training to, those fittest for leadership. If all topics have equal culture value and fit equally well for life and college, every youth would naturally select whatever topics the college suggests, and every teacher would adopt any methods it prescribes, for all other differences are obliterated. The growing preponderance of scholastic topics, the increase of high school classes in the first year, and the augmented subserviency of secondary teachers, who here find the uniformity so dear to the inert mind — because its ready-made scheme, supported by the most respectable pedagogic authority, relieves them from the vaster problems of local and all other adjustments — show the tri- umphs, and the growing percentages of those who drop out from loss of zest show the havoc wrought by these master- strokes of college politics. The voters, who have lately so multiplied high schools, were at first pleased with the dignity INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 515 of the fitting function that seemed to make academic life so accessible, but the people are slower and their interests less enlightened and less sharply defined. Their real voice has not yet been clearly heard, and their unformulated purpose has not yet been accomplished. It is an infinitely greater prob- lem to fit for life than to fit for college, and requires far more thought and a larger accumulation of experiences. It was natural, therefore, that college interests, which are so simple and easy, should be the first on the ground and should come to power. The evils of this dominance are now so great and manifest that they must be transient.
(a) Effects on Colleges and Professors. — While the pres- sure of work in the high school has been greatly increased, this very fact has been to some extent the cause of decreased pressure of work inside the college. Professor Byerly 1 says, " It is commonly and, I believe, correctly asserted that a stu- dent of fair ability entering college from a good preparatory school, choosing his courses with discretion, using borrowed or purchased lecture notes, and attending one or two coaching ' seminars ' for a couple of evenings before the mid-year and final examinations, can win our A. B. degree without spending more than half an hour a day in serious study outside of the lecture and examination rooms." " Why," he adds, with all the distractions, " should a young man without strong intel- lectual interests ' live laborious days ' when he sees his com- rades gaining their degrees on such easy terms? He naturally becomes a butterfly, and by his attractive example makes it harder for his fellow ants to pursue the diligent tenor of their way." In a large college on the elective plan, with many be- ginners and advanced courses, " discretion " in selection can no doubt do a great deal, and does, at least in extreme cases. Not only are many too well prepared, but they have brushed the bloom off many subjects and become a little blase thereby, and sit down at the college table with appetites slightly dulled. Could the above statement be made in any preparatory course? and if not, by what right do the colleges bind heavy burdens upon the high school and refuse to bear them themselves? All up the grades the question has long been, Where are the two 1 Harvard Graduates' Magazine, December, 1902.
516 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE or more lost years that have been sought like the lost tribes? Can any grade put forth a stronger claim for them than the college, if this statement be true? The high school, as we saw, weeds out more than three-fourths of those who enter, before the completion of its course. How many leave the college, which now has the enormous motive of tuition fees to retain all it can? Again, colleges have of late an unwholesome af- fectation of rating themselves by the raw material which they receive from the high school, when their own merits should be tested by the finished products they turn out at the end, finis coronal opus. The entrance question ought to be, What is the boy fitted to receive? quite as much, if not more than, What does he possess? whereas it is when he leaves, if at any time, that the test should be what he has attained. The exclusiveness of mere high standards of entrance is a false basis of supe- riority, for it by no means of itself implies superior work within. That standards are maintained too ostentatiously high for the interests of the college itself, there is much reason to believe. Again, the colleges which have been most exacting here are just those which have also led in the cutting off at the top, in the form of concessions to students attending profes- sional courses, provided they take them at the same institution. Thus the fourth year is often sacrificed a little too much as if it were a bribe to the student to take his law, medicine, or theology at the same institution, because in that only his fourth year can count credits in both at the same time. Thus, what President Tucker and many others so strenuously insist upon as the integrity of the college unity, is to-day most im- periled, while we discuss, as Professor Penniman says, whether to serve its mental pabulum in the table d'hote of the old- fashioned fixed college course, in the European plan a la carte of the three years' elective system, or the quick lunch of the proposed two years' course. The same colleges that turn over what was once freshman's study to the high schools are also readiest to turn over severer work to the professional schools. Again, high school problems have become an important topic for college faculty discussion, and in every large institu- tion a number of professors now specialize upon high school work as guardians of collegiate interest. In the West many institutions employ an expert in pedagogy who divides his time INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 51?
between instructing students within the walls who are likely to become high school teachers and in traveling about the State inspecting schools, advising, incidentally paving the way from the high schools to the college he represents, and placing its graduates in vacancies, or conducting a teachers' bureau. I have been greatly interested in the kind of pedagogy taught in these chairs. It almost all centers or bears upon the rela- tions of high school and college. Problems of the lower grades, the larger educational questions of the day, and funda- mental principles, and those of higher education generally are either untouched or interpreted in severe accordance with the interests of their institution. The last two years have seen striking developments in this respect which can not fail to bring department education into the respect it deserves.
Again, most of the recent text-books for high schools have been written by college professors, occasionally with the co- operation of a high school man. In the remarkable develop- ment of the last decade this has been both a useful and a lucrative field, but I believe we see two baleful effects: first, these authors have a strong interest which can not be quite im- partial, scientific, or educational, and in all texts and methods are special pleaders whose minds are no longer open, who are advocates rather than judges, and bring the authority and pres- tige of their position to bear in ways that are not entirely wholesome. One who has merely expressed an educational opinion can change more easily, if he sees reason, than one who has given that opinion elaborate embodiment in a set of methods by writing a text-book. More or less of the book- agent element has sometimes seemed to be almost inexpug- nable from public discussions. But this, I hasten to say, is of course not true of the best, and not consciously true perhaps of the most, who would scorn themselves if they detected such a bias, but even this too often impairs the opinion of their candor which their hearers entertain.
Next, a college author of a high school text-book in his department can hardly refrain from giving at least some hints of the best thoughts in his mind. He has sought to ele- mentarize his specialty, to interest beginners, and this I believe in the judgment of most of the best men of science is not favorable to the best teaching in college. If professors should THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE devote themselves to writing high school texts, why should they also admit and teach beginners in their own courses? Pupils who have gone through their professor's book in high school can often afford to dawdle wrhen they take his course in college. It is sometimes said that only true greatness can ele- mentarize. Certainly it is a difficult thing and habituates the mental vision to another focus. I believe it is one of the great- est services and perhaps ought to be made a duty, or even a point of honor, by successful college teachers, before they close their career, to put down the best of their teachings, enriched by their own experience, in a text-book, which is in a sense their life-book, as Le Conte did in geology, Ganot in physics, Schwegler in philosophy, Dana in mineralogy, and many others; and I hold it a bad habit for professors in their prime to emit a long graded series of text-books, from the various rudiments up to the greatest height to which they can tiptoe, because in fact the best teachers must by long experience ad- dress themselves to but one, or at most a few, grades of work to do their best. The fact, too, that young men in high schools intending to enter a certain college prefer the text-book of their coming professor does not seem to me an entirely wholesome fact, although this evil is not great. High school youth com- monly need to approach great departments by genetic rather than by logical methods, and of this great fact, as well as how to meet it, the profession is usually ignorant. From one to three years later, however, the latter method, which would fail be- fore, can accomplish such results that not a few of the ablest academic teachers prefer virgin minds in their pupils with noth- ing to unlearn. Thus, again, it is often only an affectation that goes with limited knowledge, ignorance of youth, mechanic methods, and low pedagogic ability that demands a prolonged novitiate as a condition precedent to admission to one's courses. The present absorption in the work of prescription for lower grades is bad for every truly academic aspiration of the college, and still more of the university, that in its present par- turient stage needs all the care of all the best faculties and for lack of which it is now in great danger and pain, to say nothing here of the higher duty of research, so different from teaching that in our academic work they are rarely combined, but at best only juxtaposed, as vocation and avocation. Internal has