172 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



closed at birth or soon thereafter, the creature can learn but little. So 

 long as the brain is kept plastic, permitting the formation of new 

 associations, there is room for intellectual progress. We have thus a 

 psychological justification for the artificial extension of babyhood, but 

 possibly the college senior at the age of twenty-three has been kept 

 too long in this condition. Certain sensori-motor arcs should be early 

 closed and certain associations definitely formed, or we shall never 

 have the expert; but certain other paths must be kept open or the 

 result will be a machine. 



We begin as a matter of fact by teaching the child, supposing it to 

 have escaped the snares of the kindergarten, certain strictly utilitarian 

 studies — the three E's. Under a poorly paid and partially educated 

 woman, we place a flock of children. They sit silent and cramped 

 when movement is essential, not only for bodily health but also for the 

 formation of ideas; they are crowded into an unhealthful room when 

 all out-of-doors surrounds it; the individual child is as far as possible 

 reduced to the average child; in six or eight hours a day for six or 

 eight years the child laboriously acquires certain technical knowledge, 

 the surviving part of which could probably be got in two hours a day 

 during two years. Then in the high school, the youth perhaps takes 

 up Latin, Greek, French and German, while decent English remains 

 a foreign language; text-books in mathematics are arranged for the 

 suppression of thought, and if science is taught it is made as remote 

 as possible from human experience. At the age of eighteen or nineteen 

 the boy has put on the quantity of cerebral fat which, when duly 

 measured by the college entrance examination board for the Middle 

 States and Maryland or some other automatic weighing machine, 

 admits him to college. Here his physical and social environment is 

 suddenly changed, but he finds himself pursuing the secondary studies 

 of the preparatory school — more Latin, Greek, elementary mathematics 

 and English composition — usually under immature tutors. Later in 

 his course, he is allowed to elect miscellaneously, and his daily program 

 may have some resemblance to that of a vaudeville performance. Then 

 finally at the age of twenty-two or three those who stick to the educa- 

 tional system enter the professional schools and go to work in earnest, 

 with no time for culture or research; while a few students prepare to 

 be teachers and are encouraged to undertake independent investigation 

 under the faculty of philosophy. 



Mere criticism is nihilistic, and no sensible person would wish to 

 alter suddenly an educational system that has slowly grown. The fact 

 of its existence is evidence that it is the best we can do, but by no means 

 proof that it is the best we shall do. I have no idea what a cen- 

 tury will bring, but it is reasonable to assume that there are certain 

 things that it will take. Ten years of age is early enough to begin 



