AN EXPERIMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION 469 



When a "higher education " is demanded, for any class of persons 

 as women it means that it has hecome desirable to train their fac- 

 ulties for more difficult work than that traditionally assigned to them, 

 and also that it is desirable to enable them to get more enjoyment out 

 of any work that they do. The necessary correlative of the possession 

 of powers is the opportunity for their exercise. The existence of a 

 larger class of effectively educated women must increase their demand 

 for a larger share in that part of the world's work which requires 

 trained intelligence. Of this, literature and other art is one and only 

 one portion. The work of the professions, of the upper regions of in- 

 dustry, commerce, and finance, the work of scientific and of political 

 life, is the work appropriate to the intelligences which have proved 

 themselves equal to a course of training at once complex and severe. 

 A person destined to receive a superior education is expected to de- 

 velop more vigorous mental force, to have a larger mental horizon, to 

 handle moi'e complex masses of ideas, than another. From the be- 

 ginning, therefore, he must not merely receive useful information, 

 but be habituated to perform difficult mental operations, for only in 

 this way can the sum of mental power be increased. The order, ar- 

 rangement, and sequence of the ideas he acquires must be as carefully 

 planned as is the selection of the ideas themselves, because upon this 

 order and internal proportion his mental horizon depends. He must 

 be trained in feats of sustained attention, and in the collocation and 

 association of elementary ideas into complex combinations. Since 

 ideas are abstractions from sense-perceptions, he must be exercised 

 in the acquisition of accurate, rapid, fai*-reaching, and delicate sense 

 perceptions, in their memorization, and in the representative imagina- 

 tion which may recall them at will, and be able to abstract from them, 

 more or less remotely, ideas. Habits of rich association of ideas 

 must be formed, and of pleasure in their contemplation. And very 

 early must be offered to the child problems to be solved, either by 

 purely mental exertion, or by that combined with manual labor. And 

 all this care must be taken for girls as well as for boys, so soon as it is 

 seriously agreed that girls may be admitted to a superior as well as 

 to a primary education. 



The first intellectual faculties to be trained are perception and 

 memory. The subjects of the child's first studies should therefore be 

 selected, not on account of their ultimate utility, but on account of 

 their influence upon the development of these faculties. What sense 

 is there, then, in beginning education with instruction in the arts of 

 reading and writing ? If literature were the main business of life, or 

 if, as was at one time supposed, education meant nothing else but ac- 

 quaintance with literature, there would be some logic in the extraor- 

 dinary prominence habitually assigned in education to the study of 

 modes of literary expression. But, from the modern stand-point, that 

 education means such an unfolding of the faculties as shall put the 



