METHODS OF NINETEENTH CENTURY 23 



to enter the mysterious portals of learning. The degrees or certi- 

 ficates which were obtained in the prosecution of this course of study 

 were, as a French critic well says, social rather than pedagogical 

 institutions. 



To-day all this has changed. This change has gone further in 

 America than in Germany, and further in Germany than in England 

 or France; but in every one of these countries, in greater or less 

 degree, there has been an alteration in the underlying principle and 

 object of college training. When class lines in business broke down, 

 as they did at the close of the eighteenth century, it was no longer 

 possible to maintain in their former rigidity class lines in matters 

 of education. When careers were thrown open to ability instead of 

 being determined by birth, each man was anxious to have the ability 

 of his children developed instead of remaining content with those 

 traditional studies which had once seemed a birthright and a class 

 privilege. So long as one parent had to send his son to a college and 

 another to a military school or else let them go altogether without 

 education, each perforce took whatever the college or school chose to 

 give. But as soon as he had the opportunity to select the kind of 

 education which seemed best fitted for his son's needs, each group 

 of schools was in a measure brought into competition with the others, 

 and was compelled to arrange its course of study to meet the desires 

 of the parents. We find in the progress of the nineteenth century 

 a growing interaction and mutual influence exercised by schools and 

 colleges of different classes upon one another. The German gymna- 

 sium and the German Realschule have not preserved the sharp dis- 

 tinctions which characterized them of old, but modifications and 

 combinations have been introduced into their courses of study which 

 make the line of demarcation between them gradual instead of 

 sharp. The American college has borrowed so much from the 

 American technical school, and the American technical school has 

 borrowed so much from the American college, that it is impossible 

 to say where one class of institutions ends and the other begins. In 

 England and France the change has not gone so far, but there is 

 quite sufficient evidence to show that the same tendency exists for 

 breaking down class lines and adapting college courses to individual 

 needs. The time is past when a high school was but a high school, an 

 academy an academy, a classical school a classical school. Almost 

 every institution now has alternative courses of study, calculated to 

 develop the powers of the individual pupil rather than to promote 

 a common school life and school discipline. 



Nor does this change stop short with college and high school. It 

 makes itself felt in common school and in kindergarten. It trans- 

 forms our whole understanding of the purpose of public education. 

 In old days we taught reading and arithmetic because without 



