2 8o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



it as another great unfoldment of man, comprehending, assisting and 

 developing it. But education has been engrossed in the comparatively 

 petty role of teaching lessons. It has fitted children for immediate, 

 instinctive environment, quite omitting rational, or higher social, en- 

 vironment. The result is present conditions — a practical deadlock 

 of social forces. Education can not truly awaken the interest or 

 command the confidence of the people until it assumes the higher 

 function. 



The present obstructors of social reconstruction or variation are 

 the ill-educated though perhaps very much schooled. For schooling 

 and education are not the same. The new social variation now be- 

 ginning is an industrial readjustment which shall enable each indi- 

 vidual, regardless of the accident of birth, to realize to their full value 

 ;sll of his native powers; and this will promote progress by removing 

 artificial restrictions on individual variation. It would be very easy 

 in this country, on the basis of accepted American principles, to effect 

 the transition if educators, whose business is moulding minds to grasp 

 the larger aspect of things and training them in the power to alter 

 their views instead of reposing in fixed ones, had done their work. 

 The current method is to impede social transitions; the intelligent 

 course is to facilitate them. When educators rise above mere school- 

 mastering, social deadlocks and cataclysms will be of the past. The 

 changes they involve will be welcomed. 



While, therefore, the animal method of education is for static life — 

 stability, with man it must be for dynamic life — change, improvement. 

 And yet man's course in the past has not been complimentary to his 

 intelligence, since many, if not most of his important alterations for 

 the better have not been made by intelligent choice of the change itself, 

 nor by choice of the best way ; rather he has resisted as long as possible, 

 until life became so bad that nature by some kind of punishment or 

 eruption forced improvement upon him, as she does upon animals, 

 by her power of destruction. This is the principle of revolutions. 

 Sometimes they succeed in raising society to the level of the few higher 

 individuals, but often they are suppressed by the forces in resistance to 

 variation and adaptation. 



This adaptation to a large nature brings with it a complete mental 

 reorganization. Xor, indeed, is this lacking in physical confirmation. 

 We can already trace certain corresponding physical changes in the 

 constitution of the brain — the increase in association fibers in certain 

 parts of the cortex shortly after eighteen years of age, indicated by 

 Kaes's investigations, and the extension of Flechsig's association- 

 centers in higher animals and particularly in man. Some of these 

 cerebral changes seem to occur when increasing complexities of life 

 are making new demands on intelligence. 



