24 EDUCATION 



reading and arithmetic the pupil could not perform his duties as a 

 citizen. We taught obedience and respect for authority because we 

 thought that obedience was a good habit, authority a good thing to 

 recognize. Even in this free country of 'America we were content 

 to teach pupils to spell in the accredited way, simply because it was 

 the accredited way. To-day we have departed from all this. We 

 have tried to see what the child wants or supposes it wants rather 

 than what the community needs or supposes it needs. We have 

 substituted nature study and observation for arithmetic and de- 

 portment. We have trained up a generation of children which has 

 been brought in contact with many things, useful and otherwise, of 

 which our children of previous ages never dreamed. But they have 

 lost that respect for standards which is seen in accurate writing or 

 ciphering. We need not go so far as did that pessimist who said 

 reflectively, " School-children are not beaten so much as they were 

 when I was a boy, but neither are they taught so much, so that what 

 they gain at one end they lose at the other." But we may all express 

 concerning modern school -children as a class that regret with which 

 Artemus Ward qualified his otherwise favorable criticism of Chaucer: 

 " Mr. C. had talent, but he could n't spell." 



To-day more than ever we need to insist on the importance of this 

 work of maintaining public standards, as compared with that of 

 developing individual tastes and powers. This is especially true 

 where schools are supported with public money instead of being 

 maintained by the tuition-fees of the pupils. If a boy pays for his 

 education, it is logical and right to give him the kind of education that 

 he himself wants; but if the public pays for his education, it seems 

 logical and right to give principal emphasis to the things the public 

 wants. The public end of education is to teach the pupil to do his 

 duty as a member of a free community. It is a purely private end to 

 teach him to make as much as he can out of his fellow members in 

 that community. If we use public money for private as distinct from 

 public ends, we are adopting educational measures and principles 

 which are socialistic in the bad sense; measures which use collective 

 effort for the benefit of individuals instead of trying to enlist indi- 

 vidual effort for the benefit of the community. 



I do not wish to seem like a pessimist. That great good has re- 

 sulted from our nineteenth-century emphasis on individual rights 

 and individual activities in education I firmly believe. But I also 

 believe that in the pursuit of this good we have lost sight of some 

 other ends which past systems of education subserved; and that in 

 trying to provide the rising generation with the fullest capacity for 

 enjoyment we have fallen somewhat short of giving them that capac- 

 ity for discipline on which the educational systems of earlier periods 

 laid too exclusive stress. It is an excellent thing to develop indi- 



