54 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



must embrace a great variety of methods and courses of instruction. 

 There are roughly at the outset two main divisions of higher educa- 

 tion — the one directed to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, 

 of which the practical result cannot yet be foreseen, whereby the 

 'scholar' and the votary of pure science is evolved; the other directed 

 to the acquisition and application of special knowledge by which the 

 craftsman, the designer and the teacher are produced. The former of 

 these is called secondary, the latter technical, education. Both have 

 numerous subdivisions which trend in special directions. 



The varieties of secondary education in the former of these main 

 divisions would have to be determined generally by considerations of 

 age. There must be different courses of study for those whose educa- 

 tion is to terminate at sixteen, at eighteen and at twenty-two or 

 twenty-three. Within each of these divisions, also, there would be at 

 least two types of instruction, mainly according as the student devoted 

 himself chiefly to literature and language, or to mathematics and 

 science. But a general characteristic of all secondary schools is that 

 their express aim is much more individual than that of the primary 

 school: it is to develop the potential capacity of each individual 

 scholar to the highest point, rather than to give, as does the elementary 

 school, much the same modicum to all. For these reasons it is essential 

 to have small classes, a highly educated staff and methods of instruc- 

 tion very different from those of the primary school. In the forma- 

 tion of character the old secondary schools of Great Britain have held 

 their own with any in the world. In the rapid development of new 

 secondary schools in our cities it is most desirable that this great tradi- 

 tion of British public school life should be introduced and maintained. 

 It is not unscientific to conclude that the special gift of colonizing 

 and administering dependencies, so characteristic of the people of the 

 United Kingdom, is the result of that system of self-government to 

 which every boy in our higher public schools is early initiated. But 

 while we boast of the excellence of our higher schools on the charac- 

 ter-forming side of their work, we must frankly admit that there is 

 room for improvement on their intellectual side. Classics and mathe- 

 matics have engrossed too large a share of attention; science, as part 

 of a general liberal education, has been but recently admitted, and is 

 still imperfectly estimated. Too little time is devoted to it as a school 

 subject; its investigations and its results are misunderstood and 

 undervalued. Tradition in most schools, nearly always literary, alters 

 slowly, and the revolutionary methods of science find all the prejudices 

 of antiquity arrayed against them. Even in scientific studies, lack of 

 time and the obligation to prepare scholars to pass examinations 

 cause too much attention to be paid to theory, and too little to practice, 

 though it is by the latter that the power of original research and of 



