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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLI. No. 1069 



attention, all my life, tiie great struggle 

 that has been going on in and between 

 schools — having had the great good fortune 

 also myself to be one of the early workers 

 in the province of technical education, and 

 having been associated with the develop- 

 ment of one of the greatest of our board- 

 ing schools (Christ's Hospital) — I am. of 

 course, aware that very great progress has 

 been made, and am, in every way, hopeful 

 of the future in store for those who are un- 

 affected by present prejudices. In my 

 experience, the men to whom the progress 

 has been due have, in all cases, been trained 

 in a broader school than that of Oxford; 

 the few escapes from Oxford who have been 

 successful reformers have been the excep- 

 tions which prove the rule, as they have 

 shown themselves to be gifted with prac- 

 tical instincts: to such men the Oxford 

 literary training has been of extreme value. 

 Oxford will not gain its full value until all 

 types of ability are represented in fair pro- 

 portion by its students, not one almost ex- 

 clusively. "When this step is taken, the in- 

 cubus of the Oxford spirit will no longer be 

 upon us : it will then be possible for us to 

 regard education as "a preparation for 

 life" — a formula often used but usually 

 honored, hitherto, in the breach, rarely if 

 ever in the observance, in our schools. 



There must be no misunderstanding. 

 The representatives of literary training rely 

 chiefly on a past into which it is well not to 

 look too closely and must always work with 

 borrowed capital in the days to come: our 

 side has no distant past worth speaking of, 

 but is hopeful of a glorious future, in that 

 it will always be adding to its knowledge; 

 we desire to do their party all possible jus- 

 tice, and shall ever be in need of their 

 assistance and more than grateful for the 

 service they render us; but it must be war 

 to the knife if they will not recognize that, 

 in a progressive age, they can not lead any 



longer, that we shall decline to put up in 

 future with the conceit and narrowness of 

 outlook of the classical scholar. 



The argument I have applied to the 

 teacher is equally applicable to the taught — 

 boys and girls, indeed students generally, 

 are of different types; they have different 

 orders of ability and can not be treated as 

 if all were alike. In the beginning, we may 

 tempt them with all sorts of scholastic diet, 

 but only, in the main, in order to discover 

 their aptitudes ; when these are found, they 

 should be the main line of attack. In say- 

 ing this, I am not arguing in favor of 

 extreme specialization, but against time 

 being wasted in attempting the imposssible. 

 Some of us can learn one thing, others an- 

 other : the schools try to force too many into 

 one mould. It is essential that we should 

 try to lay certain foundations, but useless to 

 proceed when we find that some of them 

 can not be laid. 



This doctrine is applicable especially to 

 the selection of scholars and to the train- 

 ing of teachers and of evening-class stu- 

 dents. We select our scholars almost en- 

 tirely by literary tests — the result is that 

 we select persons of literary aptitude rather 

 than those gifted with practical ability for 

 every kind of service: like necessarily 

 breeds like. By insisting on "grouped 

 courses" we too often oblige students to 

 take up subjects to which they are incapa- 

 ble of paying attention with profit: most 

 of us, probably, have found out that there 

 are many subjects which we simply can not 

 learn, try as we may. 



My own experience with students has 

 satisfied me that they not only vary in abil- 

 ity, but that the different classes are of very 

 different types of mind : the engineer tends 

 to be constructive, but not analytical; the 

 analytical introspective habit of mind is 

 more highly developed in the chemist; the 

 biologist rarely has mathematical procliv- 



