THE AIM OF MODERN EDUCATION. 491 



lectual and spiritual renaissance which I doubt not will grace the 

 opening years of the coming century. This is what we want 

 this fullness of life. Shall we ever get it ? My friends, that de- 

 pends upon us upon you and me, upon the earnestness and 

 single-heartedness with which we want it. Assuredly we shall 

 never get it if we continue to fix our gaze upon the partial, upon 

 the fragment, and forget that there is such a thing as the greater 

 whole. If you persist in saying, This is good, and That is good, 

 and proceed to build up educational institutions for the pursuit of 

 this and that, what you get will be simply what you pursue this 

 and that, and naught else. And the result of this pursuit, of this 

 process of emphasizing one or two sides of life and ignoring many 

 other sides of equal or even greater importance the result is not 

 beautiful, is not encouraging. In many cases the discipline of 

 life at large would be more valuable. It is this feeling that makes 

 me count myself fortunate to have gone to school but two years 

 in all my life. 



It would perhaps interest you just here to learn a bit of curi- 

 ous testimony in regard to the practical effect of this pursuit of 

 the partial. It came in my own experience. Before I went to 

 Europe to study I had charge of the science department in our 

 older manual training school, and I noticed, or thought I noticed, 

 that many of my brighter and more promising boys had, for some 

 reason or other, been to school very little, less indeed than the 

 average. The suspicion grew so strong that at last I decided to 

 test it. I had each boy in a certain class write out his age, the 

 number of years he had been in school, how old he was when he 

 started, and whether the school had been public or private. There 

 were some surprises. There were some boys who had been to 

 school for eleven years, who had been through all the dismal 

 grind of the primary, secondary, and grammar schools, and who 

 were still bright and attractive. But the result of the whole scru- 

 tiny warranted the remarkable generalization that the brightness 

 and desirability of the boys as pupils was inversely proportional 

 to the number of years they had been at school. In a word, I 

 could do more with the boys who had been least in school. Do 

 you comprehend the full significance of this statement ? I have 

 never been able to forget it. It has made me critical of school 

 processes and methods. It stands before me a silent specter. I 

 cry aloud, Woe unto us if we are sending our children to school 

 to their hurt ! 



Let us turn now to that second question, How shall we get 

 what we want ? 



When I was quite a young man I went over to New York on 

 a literary mission. My purpose was somewhat ill defined, but I 

 think I had it in mind in a vague way that I could be very useful 



