EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT OF CHILDREN. 231 



no real difficulty, if we could once rid ourselves of those narrow 

 views of education which bound it by the walls of the school- 

 room, and can see no way of learning anything except by getting 

 it out of a book. Education, in the proper sense of the word, is 

 that course of training which will best fit an individual for the 

 business of life, or, to speak more accurately, will best enable him 

 to adjust himself in harmony with his environment. The kind of 

 education that is best for any person will depend, therefore, very 

 much upon what his environment is to be ; and as it certainly 

 can not be maintained that the environment of the majority of 

 mankind is such as to require a very great amount of book-learn- 

 ing, it may reasonably be asked whether some of our popular 

 theories of education do not need remodeling. By this I do not 

 mean that our facilities for higher education should be in any 

 way diminished, but only that we should use a little more dis- 

 crimination in applying them, and bestow the highest advan- 

 tages where they are likely to do most good. Many well-mean- 

 ing teachers labor under the idea that they must spend their 

 best energies upon dull pupils, and go on for years throwing 

 away their time in trying to accomplish what the homely wis- 

 dom of our fathers has pronounced the impossible task of mak- 

 ing a " silk purse out of a sow's ear." Trim your sow's ear, clean 

 it and comb it and make as decent and reputable a sow's ear 

 out of it as you can, by all means, but don't put your gold and 

 pearls into it, under the belief that it is a silk purse. As our 

 Georgia farmers say, put your guano on your best land, and you 

 will get a paying crop. 



Each department of the world's work can be best carried on 

 by those who are fitted for it. The intellectual work, like every 

 other, can be carried on with success only by those who have 

 some capacity for it, and, by bestowing an elaborate intellectual 

 training upon all alike, without regard to natural qualifications, 

 we damage both the state and the individual : the state, by wast- 

 ing its resources in unremunerative intellectual products ; the in- 

 dividual, by leading him into fields where he is forced into com- 

 petition with those better equipped for the struggle for existence, 

 and against whom, by the inexorable law of the " survival of the 

 fittest," he has no chance to contend with success. 



Where people have money to pay for the education of their 

 children, there is, of course, no remedy ; and in our private 

 schools and colleges we may expect always to see rich block- 

 heads grinding through the process of what they call getting an 

 education ; but where the state pays the cost it has a right to 

 see that its money is spent so as to secure the greatest benefit to 

 all concerned. This can be done by a rigid system of grading, 

 each school being a stepping-stone to the next higher. Let a 



