128 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



recondite cliarms and graces of classical cult- 

 ure when one knows what it amounts to for 

 all but here and there one. It is a rare thing 

 for a man to graduate who has read Grote or 

 Curtius, although he has studied Greek for 

 five or six years. Any one who reads no 

 Greek and never goes to college, but reads 

 Grote or Curtius, knows far more of Greek 

 life, polity, and culture than any but the 

 most exceptional college graduate. I do not 

 believe that this was formerly true. It ap- 

 pears that faithful students in former times 

 used such means as then existed for becom- 

 ing familiar with classical life and history far 

 more diligently than is now customary. Clas- 

 sical studies, having sunk to a perfunctory 

 character, now stand in the way of faithful 

 study of anything. 



I go further, and, if the classics are still 

 proposed as the stem of a liberal education, to 

 be imposed upon every student who seeks a 

 university training, I argue that classical cult- 

 ure has distinct and mischievous limitations. 

 The same may no doubt be said of any other 

 special culture, and whenever any other cult- 

 ure is put forward as possessing some exclu- 

 sive or paramount value, it will be in order to 

 show that fact. I do not doubt that I gained 

 great profit from a classical training. Part of 

 the profit I was conscious of. I think it very 

 likely that I won other profit of which I was 

 unconscious. I know that it cost me years of 

 discipline to overcome the limitations of the 

 classical training, and to emancipate my mind 

 from the limited range of processes in which 

 it had been trained. For the last ten years 1 

 have taught political economy to young men 

 of twenty-one years or thereabout who had 

 been prepared for me by training in a curricu- 

 lum based on classics. They have acquired 

 certain facilities. They have a facility in 

 "recitation" which is not always produced 

 by familiarity with the subject. The art of 

 recitation is an art all by itself. Very often 

 it is all a man has won from his college train- 

 ing. Sometimes it consists in beating out a 

 little very thin, so as to make it go a great 

 way ; sometimes it consist in " going on one's 

 general information," and profiting to the ut- 

 most by any hint in the question ; sometimes 

 it consists in talking rapidly about something 

 else than the question. Some men never 

 can come to a point, but soar in lofty circles 

 around and over the point, showing that they 

 have seen it from a distance ; others present 

 rags and tags of ideas and phrases, showing 

 that they have read the text, and that here 

 and there a word has stuck in the memory 

 without sequence or relation. The habit of 

 reading classics with a " pony " for years has 



produced these results. Many of these men 

 must he regarded with pity because their 

 mental powers have been miseducated for 

 years, and when they try to acquire some- 

 thing, to make it their own, to turn it into a 

 concise and correct statement and utter it 

 again, they can not do it. They have only 

 acquired some tricks of speech and memory. 



The case of men who have studied honest- 

 ly, but who have been educated almost ex- 

 clusively on grammar, is difierent. No doubt 

 they have gained a great deal, but I find that 

 they hardly ever know what a " law "is in 

 the scientific sense of the word. They think 

 that it is like a rule in grammar, and they are 

 quite prepared to find it followed by a list of 

 exceptions. They very often lack vigor and 

 force in thinking. They either accept au- 

 thority too submissively, if the notion which 

 is presented does not clash with any notions 

 they had received before, or, if they argue, 

 they do so on points of dialectical ingenuity. 

 They do not join issue closely and directly, 

 and things do not fall into order and range in 

 their minds. They seem to be quite con- 

 tented to take things and hold them in a 

 jumble. It is rare to find one who has 

 scholarship enough to look up an historical 

 or biographical reference. It is generally as- 

 sumed by them that if " no lesson has been 

 given out " they have nothing to do. One of 

 the most peculiar notions is that a " lecture " 

 has no such importance as a " recitation" ; 

 that to cut the former is of no consequence, 

 but that to cut the latter is serious. In short, 

 the habits and traditions in which men have 

 been trained when they reach senior year in 

 college are such that they are yet boys in 

 responsibility, and, although they are very 

 manly and independent in many respects, 

 they are dependent and unmanly in their 

 methods of study, in their conception of duty, 

 in their scholarship, and in their code of con- 

 duct in all that afl'ects the institution. It has 

 been claimed for the classics that they give 

 guidance for conduct. This is, to me, the 

 most amazing claim of all, for, in my experi- 

 ence and observation, the most marked fact 

 about classical culture is that it gives no guid- 

 ance in conduct at all. 



The tendency of classical studies is to ex- 

 alt authority, and to inculcate reverence for 

 what is written, rather than for what is true. 

 Men educated on classics are apt to be caught 

 by the literary form, if it is attractive. They 

 are fond of paradoxes, and will entertain two 

 contradictory ideas, if only each come in a 

 striking literary dress. They think that they 

 prove something when they quote somebody 

 who has once said it. If any one wants to 



