20 EDUCATION 



the world over, from Horace Mann at one end of the century to 

 Levasseur at the other, however different the problems with which 

 they had to deal, shaped them toward this common end. We came 

 to regard the development of the individual as the goal of education. 

 Some of us have even come to regard it as an axiomatic and self- 

 evident goal; to be surprised that people in other times or countries 

 could have sought other ends than this; to misjudge the educational 

 systems of the past on account of their failure to conform to nine- 

 teenth-century standards. Many a writer on education is prone to 

 treat the schools of previous ages as though they represented a very 

 bad attempt to do what we are doing to-day, instead of a tolerably 

 good attempt to do something totally different. 



Let us see, if we can, how this pursuit of individual development 

 manifests itself in different kinds of schools at the present time. 

 We may well begin with the matter of professional training. This is 

 the field of education where the aim is plainest. This is where the 

 variety of the problems is least. This is, therefore, the point where 

 we can see the distinctive features of the school system of any age or 

 country most sharply exemplified. 



The first difference that strikes us in the new professional training 

 as compared with the old is the vastly greater amount of time which 

 is accorded to it and of emphasis which is placed on its importance. 

 In earlier ages there was no well-developed system of technical 

 schools except for the three so-called learned professions -- clerical, 

 legal, and medical; and even in these callings the student obtained 

 most of his real training in the actual experience of the office or 

 the forum rather than in the preliminary work of the classroom. 

 To-day all this has changed. In the learned professions what was 

 formerly a brief and somewhat profitless course of study has been 

 greatly extended in length and animated by new life and new methods. 

 Preparation for medicine, for instance, involves not only a longer 

 course of study in the medical school than it once did, but a time of 

 combined study and work in the hospital, which is now recognized as 

 an essential element in thorough training. In other professions, 

 like the different departments of engineering or technology, special 

 schools of a character hardly known at the end of the eighteenth 

 century have multiplied themselves during the nineteenth until 

 they have become more numerous and more largely attended than 

 the old schools of theology or law or medicine. The soldier has 

 learned that he cannot despise the theory of his trade; and this has 

 led to the establishment, first in France and then in other countries, 

 of military or naval academies of a high order. The success of these 

 schools in training military engineers has led to the establishment of 

 other colleges of engineering for men who intended to apply mathe- 

 matical science to the arts of peace rather than of war. From these 



