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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXI. No. 796 



in character, it must be remembered that 

 the process has only been begun in the 

 preparatory school and that three or four 

 years of purely technical professional 

 study may quite easily neutralize the cul- 

 tural effect of his preparatory work unless 

 his professional training is conducted with 

 reference to conserving and further de- 

 veloping his powers of intellectual growth. 



I realize full well that I am likely to 

 arouse an attitude of incredulity, even 

 possibly of scorn, by the suggestion that 

 anything in the curriculum of dental study 

 may have a cultural value as such, quite 

 apart from its material technical useful- 

 ness; but because I believe that something 

 more than mere technical training can be 

 gotten out of the dental course, that some- 

 thing in the nature of character develop- 

 ment may be derived from doing the 

 work of the dental curriculum, I am en- 

 couraged to present that side of the ques- 

 tion, for I am convinced that its due rec- 

 ognition will eventuate not only in reliev- 

 ing those of us who are teachers of a 

 source of criticism, but also it will greatly 

 improve the grade and texture of our edu- 

 cational product and make our graduates 

 not only better dentists but men of larger 

 intellectual resources and therefore more 

 acceptable members of society. 



Can the dental curriculum be utilized 

 for the attainment of these desirable ends? 

 Let us seek the answer in an analogy. It 

 may be stated almost axiomatically that in 

 the materialization of great artistic con- 

 ceptions the character of the medium in 

 which they may be expressed is a minor 

 consideration. What concerns us most in 

 the contemplation of a statue, for example, 

 is not the material of which it is made, but 

 is it good art, does it bear the stamp of ar- 

 tistic genius? The creations of the great- 

 est masters of harmony were in many cases 

 interpreted upon instruments of inferior 



grade, but the soul of music may speak its 

 divine message through any medium, and 

 enthralled by its spell, we care not if it be 

 "blown through brass or breathed through 

 silver." So also in the utilization of edu- 

 cation for the ends of culture it is not the 

 means by which the intellectual activities 

 are set in motion that are of primary im- 

 portance, but rather the ends toward which 

 our educational efforts are directed, and it 

 is these that should mainly concern us both 

 as teachers and as students. 



Education dominated by the purely util- 

 itarian motif, as most of our modern edu- 

 cation is, loses its cultural effect by con- 

 centrating the mental faculties upon the 

 function of acquisition, of getting, as an 

 intellectual process. The graduate thus 

 trained goes forth to his life work, which 

 consists for the most part in converting his 

 mental potential into terms of material 

 possession. 



By the overemphasis of the utilitarian 

 ideal those faculties of the mind, the exer- 

 cise of which creates a taste for the higher 

 orders of intellectual enjoyment, suffer 

 from arrest of development, under which 

 conditions any process of thought that 

 does not work out to a concrete material 

 end becomes impossible. 



In this way we are not only creating a 

 deformed and one-sided educational prod- 

 uct, but still worse, we are closing the doors 

 that lead to the sources of highest human 

 happiness. The age is essentially utilitar- 

 ian, the demand is for the practical and for 

 the kind of education which may be ulti- 

 mately expressed in terms of material 

 prosperity. In response to the universal 

 clamor for an education that will help 

 to achieve these material ends, our schools, 

 our seats of higher learning, are yielding, 

 many of them under protest, to the general 

 demand. The old and one-time popular 

 type of education, the study of Greek and 



