OUTLINES FROM THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION. 225 



should agree upon such prescribed studies as above set down, for all 

 undergraduate students, will not find ready credence. The move- 

 ment at Harvard which is now phrased as the new education, though 

 an extreme, is perfectly natural, and easily lends itself to such brill- 

 iant advocacy as that of Professor Palmer : " The old conception had 

 been that there were certain matters, a knowledge of which consti- 

 tuted a liberal education. Compared with the possession of these, the 

 temper of the receiving mind was a secondary affair. Under the new 

 conditions college faculties were forced to recognize personal apti- 

 tudes. In assessing the worth of studies, attention was thus with- 

 drawn from their subject-matter, and transferred to the response 

 they called forth in the apprehender. Hence arose a new ideal of 

 education in which temper of mind had pre-eminence over qucesita, 

 the guidance of the powers of knowing over the store of matters 

 known." Nothing could well be found more admirable than the 

 reply of Professor Howison to this paragraph. So far as a recogni- 

 tion of the needs of human nature is concerned, he seems to meet 

 the case completely : " Study can not be liberalizing unless it is pur- 

 sued in a temper of freely dutiful diligence, but no more can it be so 

 if it does not put its subject in possession of the constitutive fibers of 

 civilization [italics present writer's]. Our life in humanism is linked 

 by vital threads to the growth of the past as well as to the environ- 

 ment of the present — threads that can not be severed except on pen- 

 alty of spiritual death." We inquire how shall the student be put in 

 possession of the " constitutive fibers in the historic substance of civili- 

 zation " ? In reply, Professor Howison gives his curriculum for all 

 undergraduate study : 



" Languages, classical and modern ; mathematics, in all its general 

 conceptions, thoroughly apprehended ; physics, acquired in a similar 

 manner, and the other natural sciences, though with much less of de- 

 tail ; history and politics ; literature, especially of the mother-tongue, 

 but indispensably the masterpieces in other languages, particularly the 

 classic ; philosophy, in the thorough elements of psychology, logic, 

 metaphysics, and ethics, each historically treated, and economics, in 

 the history of elementary principles, must all enter into any education 

 that can claim to be liberal." 



This is, indeed, a " liberal " course of study, but no amount of 

 argument could persuade a large number of our educators, or of our 

 average citizens, to insist upon such a course for each student. If here 

 alone be a liberal education, many would say, so much the worse for a 

 liberal education ; we will have none of it. To compel a boy, who has 

 absolutely no natural disposition for it, to spend his years in groans 

 over mathematics or classics, or psychology, logic, metaphysics, and 

 ethics, would be a matter calling for action from the Society for Pre- 

 vention of Cruelty. And yet the writer is in direct sympathy with 

 the position of Professor Howison. The writer believes that these are 

 VOL. xxx. — 15 



