SELECT WRITINGS. 



MENTAL DISCIPLINE IN EDUCATION. 



All educational inquiries assume that man is individ- 

 ually improvable, and therefore collectively progressive. 

 Through varied experiences he is slowly civilized, and 

 there is a growth of knowledge with the course of ages. 

 But while thought is ever advancing, it is the nature of in- 

 stitutions to fix the mental states of particular times ; and 

 there hence arises a tendency to conflict between growing 

 ideas and the external arrangements which are designed to 

 express and embody them. Thought refuses to be station- 

 ary ; institutions refuse to change, and war is the conse- 

 quence. 



This fact is familiarly illustrated in the case of govern- 

 ment. Ideas and character, having outgrown the arbitrary 

 institutions of the remoter past, there has arisen between 

 them an antagonism, of the results of which modern his- 

 tory is full. So, too, religious conceptions having devel- 

 oped beyond the ecclesiastical organizations to which 

 they at first gave rise, a struggle arose in the sixteenth 

 century, which, resulting in the Protestant Reformation, 

 has persisted under various aspects to the present time. 

 And so it is also with the traditional systems of mental 

 culture. Educational institutions which have been be- 

 queathed to us by the past, and which may have been 



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