Jantabt 30, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



157 



one million two hundred thousand students 

 In high schools; a third of a million in 

 higher institutions. Reading and writing 

 have become, like air and water, the com- 

 mon heritage of all. This is the great 

 achievement of democracy in the modern 

 world. Thereby it has assured its own per- 

 manence and has opened up the way along 

 which it will advance. 



Reading and writing are indeed only 

 pass-keys which unlock various gates. 

 Further progress by way of the newspaper 

 and the moving-picture show is halting. 

 We have inherited the educational ideals 

 of the idling classes and their dependent 

 priests and clerks. The common school 

 prepares for the high school, the high 

 school for the college, the college for 

 "Who's Who." Our scholastic methods, 

 invaluable for intercommunication at a dis- 

 tance in space and time, may inhibit 

 thought and action, even the finer forms of 

 speech and the more direct expression of 

 the emotions. A few days since a neigh- 

 bor in the country, now over eighty years 

 old, who suffered or enjoyed such educa- 

 tional limitations that she can barely read, 

 wrote to me "I am still alive but i don't 

 know what for. ' ' At school she would have 

 been taught to use modestly a capital "I" 

 for the first personal pronoun and not to 

 end a sentence with a preposition. I have 

 learned these things and to use words such 

 as "direct" and "effective," but I do not 

 use words so directly and effectively as my 

 neighbor. One of my children at the age 

 of ten, never having been in school, wrote 

 verses such as: 



An army marching through the fields 

 They had on their shields 

 They were ready to fight until night 

 But there was no army to fight 



and 



The breeze that blows is the salt sea breeze 

 After instruction in English she relapsed 



into the conventional and the common- 

 place. 



Who now can write a sentence such as 

 ' ' In the beginning God created the heaven 

 and the earth," or sentences such as are 

 found on every page of Homer and Dante 1 

 In the words of Arnold : 



What girl 



Now reads in her bosom as clear 



As Eebekah read, when she sate 



At eve by the palm-shaded well? 



Who guards in her breast 



As deep, as pellucid a spring 



Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure? 



What bard, 



At the height of his vision, can deem 



Of God, of the world, of the soul, 



With a plainness as near, 



As flashing as Moses felt 



When he lay in the night by his flock 



On the starlit Arabian waste? 



Can rise and obey 



The beck of the Spirit like him? 



We do not know what well-educated men 

 and women who could not read would be 

 like. If the authors of the Homeric poems 

 could read and write they did not spend 

 much time in such occupations. Certainly 

 they did not learn to use their own lan- 

 guage by the study of Latin. A friend 

 asked a porter in a Swiss hotel, who used 

 many languages with equal facility and in- 

 correctness, which was his native tongue. 

 He replied that he did not know, he spoke 

 all languages ; then, in answer to the ques- 

 tion as to the language in which he thought, 

 "I neva tink." 



Children must learn to read, write and 

 calculate, but under proper conditions of 

 family and society schools to teach these 

 tricks would be nearly as superfluous as 

 schools to teach infants to walk and talk. 

 Those familiar with the literature of peda- 

 gogic edification will be weary of the iter- 

 ation that the word "educate" means to 

 lead out, which, not cramming full, should 



