SPECIALIST BLIGHT ON AMERICAN EDUCATION 343 



teaching of science a real search into fundamental principles and an 

 exposition of all-embracing truths ! " Facts," said Mr. Thomas Grad- 

 grind, " facts alone are wanted in life " ; and facts — the more minute 

 the better — are the goal and joy of the specialist. But man is not an 

 examinable fact; he is a veritable kaleidoscope of elusive impulses, im- 

 pressions, ideals, fictions; and it is with man that the whole life of the 

 educated man is to be lived. 



In our schools and colleges (and especially in our professional 

 schools), we need to get back to the humanities — not to the humanities 

 of Greece and Eome as expounded in Oxford and diluted in America; 

 but to the humanities of the twentieth century. For the study of the 

 real humanities implies a working-knowledge of humankind, of men. 

 We have been so overwhelmed with facts and discoveries and theories 

 and inventions and names and classifications, that we are forgetting 

 that the main fact in life is you and I. We have been so busy stuffing 

 our children and our students with these facts that these classifications, 

 that we are forgetting that the main things which they, as men, must 

 know are men. Therefore give a boy, give a student all the facts and 

 all the practise that he can get in school and college, provided you do 

 not fail to give him, at the same time, a broad outlook upon history, 

 upon literature, upon human experience and human life. Whether he is 

 to start in a store, in an office or as a " drummer " ; whether he is to be a 

 minister, a lawyer, an engineer or a doctor, his success in life depends 

 enormously upon his ability to get on with and to handle men. He 

 can not have that success unless he is broad, catholic, tolerant, tactful 

 and philosophical; and he can not be those things unless he has been 

 trained, not as a specialist, but as a man. By success is not meant, of 

 course, mere financial and professional success — though in nine cases 

 out of ten those are most likely to be achieved by the broadest man — 

 but that highest success which comes through the widest social useful- 

 ness, through the consciousness that one has got out of life that which 

 has made the pains of living really worth while. 



It may be an exaggeration to say that American scholarship is in a 

 deplorable condition; but every American must acknowledge that we 

 do not produce our due proportion of great men. There are, of course, 

 many excuses which may properly be offered; but one of the funda- 

 mental reasons is that we permit our promising youth to specialize too 

 soon. Consequently their scholarship, to paraphrase Bacon, is that of 

 boys, who can talk but who can not generate. To produce men with the 

 loins from which will spring great contributions to human thought 

 and action we must gradually make over our whole system of elementary 

 education so that youth, instead of being put through vast machines 

 for imparting facts, shall be put into small classes under intellectually 

 strong women, and especially under intellectually and morally strong 



