206 PREJUDICE AGAINST INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS. 



Supremacy of the Classics. A course of study made up mostly 

 of Greek, Latin, and mathematics and its applications, and philos- 

 ophy, usually goes by the name of the classical course. Until a 

 recent period no course of study, however thorough and pro- 

 tracted, was supposed to give that discipline of mind, that culture, 

 that acquaintance with what a scholar should know, that would 

 entitle one to be called educated. This term, educated, had a 

 technical and limited, and as I believe far too narrow an applica- 

 tion. The prejudice is by no means gone by, but to a great 

 degree domineers over both the educated and the unlearned people 

 of this day. But the educational problem has broken out afresh, 

 and this time it is the battle of the classics and the sciences. 



Statement of the case. While the sciences, other than the appli- 

 cation of mathematics, have been of immense importance in 

 modern life, they have been slow in fighting their way into modern 

 courses of study. "Ten years ago," says Nature, a London 

 weekly scientific journal of the highest authority, in its volume 

 for 1869, vol. 1, p. 25 : " Rugby was the ouly public school that 

 taught science at all. No school was assigned to it. It was an 

 extra, and heavily weighted by extra payment." The great 

 universities, rich in their rewards to those who came from the 

 schools with high scholarship, ignored proficiency in sciences 

 almost altogether; so the whole influence of social standing and 

 great wealth were on the side of the classics. This is still so, to 

 a great, a very great, extent. The schools and universities, 

 backed by the customs of a long past and the prejudices of the 

 day, wait for a miracle to set things right. They say they wait 

 for each other. The schools say they must prepare scholars for 

 what will take the prizes ; the universities, that they must give 

 their rewards to those who are properly qualified. The slow 

 workings of public opinion will in time, however, call Cinderella 

 from beside the ashes to her proper place, the equal of her sisters. 



American colleges copied the English. They were designed 

 chiefly to educate clergymen. I hold in my hand a Yale College 

 catalogue for 1841-2. There was then no scientific school at Yale. 

 The catalogue speaks of certain limited courses of lectures in the 

 natural sciences, delivered to different classes, but if we look to 

 the one course of study which all students were obliged to pursue, 

 we find in that no chemistry, no botany, no zoology, no geology, 

 nor anatomy, physiology, mineralogy, meteorology. It is all 



