666 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



charmed with the beauties of Homer and Virgil, but deficient in the 

 elements of political economy ; able to compute the distance of the 

 sun, but incapable of explaining our system of national cui-rency ! Take, 

 if you will, the curricula of the high schools, colleges, and universities 

 of the land, and compute the percentage of studies found there that are 

 calculated to make competent members of the commonwealth ! And 

 yet this is the boasted system of education upon which we are told the 

 perpetuity of our government depends ! 



It noAV becomes necessary to apj^ly to education our second test, 

 namely : Can it be done more efficiently by the state than by individ- 

 ual effort?' Many, no doubt, Avho are ready to accept the conclusions 

 already reached on the subject of special education, will still be in- 

 clined to think that general instruction should be at the expense and 

 under the control of the state. But, before we attempt to decide by 

 what agency we can best attain a certain object, it is necessary that 

 we should have a well-defined idea of that object. What, then, is the 

 true object of education ? It is, if I mistake not, to aid Nature in per- 

 fecting the individual. Its aim should be to promote, not to destroy, 

 individuality. Its object is human development, but, in the language 

 of Von Humboldt, it is human development in its richest diversity. 



The great poet Goethe saw and the naturalist Von Baer formulated 

 the truth that in all organic life development consists of a change from 

 a state of homogeneity to a state of heterogeneity ; that, as we ascend 

 the scale of animal life, there is a gradual transition from the like to 

 the unlike, from unity to diversity. The social organism is no excep- 

 tion to this general law, and so we find among savages a marked simi- 

 larity in costume, food, habits of life and in opinions. But as we 

 ascend the scale of civilization we find fewer universal habits and still 

 fewer universal opinions. Indeed, it has been shown that those opin- 

 ions which are universal usually date back to the childhood of the race, 

 and hence are usually false. Then social as well as physical develop- 

 ment is a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. But 

 all history shows that nations as well as individuals have not only a 

 period of youth and of manhood, but also a period of decay and of 

 death. What is the cause of this fatal event which nations like indi- 

 viduals have sought, but sought in vain, to evade ? Where does this 

 retrograde movement begin ? Nations decline because the conditions 

 of their development are reversed ; and decay begins just at that point 

 at which the tendency to heterogeneity is exchanged for the tendency 

 to homogeneity at that point at which the people cease to become 

 more diversified and begin to become more and more alike. There is 

 in the development of nations a unanimity of savagery, a diversity of 

 progress, and again a unanimity of stagnation. In view of these facts 

 it becomes the duty of the educator to give full scope to the individuaf, 

 and to encourage rather than restrain the peculiarities of the young. 



If these propositions be true, it is, then, by no means clear that the 



