n8 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and taught in the preparatory schools 

 and at Harvard College, and found that 

 they had yielded to him none of the 

 great and salutary results that are 

 claimed for them. President Porter 

 replies that we are not bound to accept 

 the cause assigned for the alleged fail- 

 ure. He savs : " Mr. Adams seems to 

 forget that at least three solutions may 

 be given for the apparent failure of his 

 own college life, of ^ hich he has recog- 

 nized but one: 1. The failure was only 

 apparent, but not real, or not to the 

 extent which he imagines. He de- 

 rived more advantage than he is now 

 aware of, even from the Greek. ... 2. 

 The curriculum may have been wisely 

 selected, and the teaching may have 

 been imperfect. ... 3. The student may 

 neglect and render futile the most 

 wisely-selected curriculum, even when 

 enforced by the most skillful and zeal- 

 ous teaching." 



It is upon the first of these consid- 

 erations that President Porter lays the 

 greatest stress in his article. He does 

 not urge the other alternatives either 

 that the Harvard teaching was bad, or 

 that Mr. Adams was idle or negligent, 

 but he argues that Mr. Adams is mis- 

 taken in his assertion that he derived 

 no important benefits from his classical 

 studies. He says: "In judging of the 

 effects of a course of studies, the sharp 

 distinction should be made between the 

 impressions which are actually received, 

 and the reflective recognition of these 

 impressions by the recipient and his own 

 consequent estimate of them." And 

 again : " It is certainly no new thing for 

 children, even those of an older growth, 

 to fail to appreciate the value of the 

 training to which they owe all their 

 success in life, and to esteem those 

 features of it the least to which they 

 owe the most." 



We have here the old stock defense 

 of the classical superstition. It is not a 

 failure, because it exerts certain won- 

 derful and mysterious influences of 

 which the student may not be aware, 



but which are abundantly vindicated 

 by time. That is, the student is not 

 the proper judge of the effects upon his 

 own mind of the leading studies to 

 which he gives the best years of his 

 life. But it is proper to ask, If those 

 who have had experience of it " fail to 

 appreciate the value of the training to 

 which they owe all their success in 

 life," who else has authority to speak 

 in the matter? The argument cuts 

 both ways. If Mr. Adams did not 

 know when he declared that the study 

 of Greek had in his case proved a fail- 

 ure, does President Porter know when 

 he denies it ? If the evidence of expe- 

 rience is not to be trusted, what evi- 

 dence is to be taken ? The case looks 

 like one of dogmatic assumption against 

 positive self-knowledge. If a college 

 graduate, after long trial of his educa- 

 tion in the arena of practical life, is 

 incompetent to decide upon its adapta- 

 bility and adequacy to his needs, then 

 there are no valid grounds of judgment 

 in the matter. But the idea is an out- 

 rage upon common sense, and we might 

 be well surprised that it should be put 

 forth by a distinguished college presi- 

 dent if we did not know to what ridic- 

 ulous shifts the classicists are driven in 

 defense of their anomalous traditions. 

 Sydney Smith long ago declared, in re- 

 lation to the classical superstition, that 

 it has been the practice of the universi- 

 ties "to take credit for all the mind 

 they did not succeed in extinguishing." 

 The practice lives on in the equally 

 preposterous assumption that all the 

 success a university man achieves in 

 life is due to the Greek and Latin he 

 learned or did not learn whether he 

 knows it or not. That this nonsensical 

 notion should be so all-prevalent, and 

 still so influential with multitudes, only 

 shows how completely even our high- 

 er education is still in the fetichistic 

 stage. 



What President Porter had before 

 him to do was to break the force of 

 Mr. Adams's testimony that his clas- 



