358 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



It may be questioned whether the glorification of our educational 

 ideals, and the formal aspects of it in particular, has not been greatly 

 overdone. In spite of more than a century of its trial the per cent, of 

 illiteracy is still large. This I believe to be due to the fact that there 

 has not been allowed to operate more freely the process of selection. 

 Not all children arc fit for formal education. They have no business in 

 either school or college, except in the former for the merest rudiments 

 of learning. For them the apprenticeship, the trade-school, the voca- 

 tional fitting, is that through which nature may afford some chance for 

 a place. Many a boy should never be encouraged to go to college, and 

 would not if any pains had been taken to look into his mental pedigree. 

 He is sent in many cases out of mere fashion, a sort of social exaction 

 which has for him only a social significance, or value, wholly beneath the 

 aim of a college standard of any real dignity or worth. And as in the 

 school, only more so, his presence involves the same low and compromis- 

 ing standard and reaction upon all concerned. 



Let the gauntlet be thrown down without hesitation or apolog}- — 

 Distinctly academic culture, education for scholarly ends, is not for all. 

 Aye, more, the ordinary scliool is not for all. Is this akin to treason, a 

 direct challenge of the compulsory school laws? I do not overlook the 

 beneficent aim of these laws. No more need one shut the eyes to another 

 code, that for prevention of cruelty to animals. To how many of us 

 has it occurred that occasion for the latter may as often be found under 

 the former, or in other words, that truant officers and a system which 

 makes them necessary are as amenable to the latter code as are those who 

 torture horses or beat hel^Dless wives? The cruelty of which I protest 

 is that which thoughtlessly or ignorantly grinds every intellectual grist 

 through a common hopper. The schools do not differentiate, teachers do 

 not discriminate between matters of quality and quantity as mental fac- 

 tors. An expert in nervous disorders said in a recent address before a 

 public assembly in Syracuse that " Xew York State schools contribute a 

 larger quota to the insane asylums than any other agency." This might 

 be variously construed, but surely it should give us pause in our zeal for 

 compulsory education. But tliese laws are not designedly vicious; they 

 only express misapprehension, they fail to discriminate. 



Gal ton has shown beyond reasonable doubt that genius follows the 

 same laws which control other phases of development. Indeed the ear- 

 lier pioneer work of Galton blazed out the path which our later experi- 

 mental methods have demonstrated, over and over again, to be now 

 almost a highway, so clear is its course, so readily followed. Concerning 

 this very matter of discrimination and selection he made bold to declare : 



I believe that if the eminent men of any period had been changelings 

 when babies, a very large proportion of those \\\\o survived and retained health 

 up to fifty years of age would, notwithstanding their altered circumstances, have 

 arisen to eminence. Now if the hindrances to success were very great, we should 



