340 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE SPECIALIST BLIGHT ON AMEKICAN EDUCATION 



By JAMES P. MUNROE 



BOSTON, MASS. 



SPECIALISM is the order of the day. From the professor of Greek 

 down to the " professor " who shines one's shoes, that man is in 

 demand who is disposed to concentrate all his energies upon the learn- 

 ing or the doing of one thing. Even our households have become 

 infected, for therein is now to be found the very apotheosis of special- 

 ization. Even so late as the beginning of the last quarter of the nine- 

 teenth century, one maid would do substantially all the work of the 

 house; whereas, to-day, the lady who condescends to burn one's beef- 

 steak and to parboil one's potatoes will not enter the laundry or the 

 dining-room, while the other maid (or maids) would join the family 

 in general starvation before so far forgetting her " place " as to cook 

 a single meal. 



But what can be expected of the rank and file of the modern world 

 when the leaders of American life, men in the professions and in those 

 higher institutions which prepare for the professions, have seemingly 

 gone mad upon the question of specialization? Like the gypsy-moth, 

 the specialist was imported from Europe, either directly or through 

 young men who went there for medical, linguistic or other higher 

 studies; and many a green tree of scholarship, many a fair, broad field 

 of general culture has been converted by this importation into a naked 

 waste of narrow pedantry. 



Of course, the time has long gone by when any man, no matter how 

 brilliant, can, in Bacon's words, "take all learning for his province." 

 But that does not justify the running to an opposite extreme, does not 

 excuse the digging of a hole in the side of a small mound of erudition, 

 getting into the farthest end of it, and maintaining that the tiny 

 patch of sky framed by the mouth of the hole is all of the universe 

 worth while. It is probably necessary that some man should spend 

 his whole life grubbing at a certain obstinate Greek root; but why call 

 him learned, when he is simply industrious? Why reward him with 

 titles and emoluments, and give no scholastic encouragement to the 

 far less erudite man who is nevertheless sending intellectual and moral 

 roots over a wide area of human thought and life? 



The curse of American scholarship and of American education is 

 the Ph.D. For in exalting this decoration of the specialist, we are 

 repeating the error of the Schoolmen, who confounded erudition, 



