August 21, 1003.] 



SCIENCE. 



229 



the English system of secondary edueatiou, 

 as follows: "In a scientific age and in an 

 industrial section, an exclusive edueatiou 

 in the dead languages is a curious anomaly. 

 The flowers of literature should indeed be 

 cultivated, but it is not wise to send men 

 into our fields of industry to reap the har- 

 vest, when they have been taught to pick 

 the poppies and push aside the wheat." 



When the wide-awake, inquisitive boy 

 knows that eleetricitj', and steam and heat, 

 and the art of designing and constructing 

 automatic machines can be studied and un- 

 derstood with no more effort and in less 

 time than it takes to commit to memorj^ a 

 Latin grammai", or to read Demosthenes 

 without a dictionary, and that those former 

 things are ten times as interesting as the 

 latter, and a hundred times as likely to be 

 of service to him in the struggle for life 

 and the battle for success, he will choose 

 them if he has a chance. And it is our 

 business to give him a chance. To quote 

 Emerson again: 'We must take the step 

 from knowing to doing.' I read the other 

 day that in Indianapolis, Ind., where they 

 have two fine high schools, one of the older 

 and one of the newer type, 580 pupils from 

 the grammar grades applied for admission 

 to the high schools. Four hundred of 

 them, or 69 per cent., applied for the man- 

 ual training high school. This indicates not 

 so much a change of sentiment in regard to 

 the values of the classical school as the crea- 

 tion of a new high school constituency. 



We want living languages and living 

 issues. We must teach the duties of an 

 American citizen rather than the manner 

 of life of a slave-owner in Athens or 

 Babylon. We must •teach the mechanics, 

 hydraulics, electricity and chemistry of to- 

 day rather than the physical theories of 

 Aristotle and the alchemists. We must 

 illustrate and explain the battle of Santiago 

 rather than the battle of Salamis. It is a 



thousand times more interesting and more 

 useful to the average boy to know how 

 modern engineers tunneled under the Alps 

 than to read the fabulous stories of how 

 Hannibal made a road over them ; to know 

 how Eads built a railway bridge across the 

 ^lississippi, than to decipher Caesar's foot- 

 bridge over the Rhine ; to analyze and com- 

 prehend the water-works of Boston or Lon- 

 don, than the hydraulic system of ancient 

 Rome, marvelous as it was; to master the 

 universal language of drawing, than to get 

 a smattering of a language which no one 

 speaks and no one writes; to become famil- 

 iar with modern methods of construction 

 and the skillful use of tools and machinery, 

 than to speculate over the Tower of Babel 

 or the Pyramids of Egj'pt. 



Here is the magnificent opportunity for 

 the secondary school; to use a military 

 phrase, let it change front and face the 

 world of to-day. Let it open all its doors 

 and windows to the humanities of to-day. 

 Look around you and look forward, not 

 always backward. Weep not, as Ruskin 

 did for departed days, for the lumbering 

 stage-coach, the storm-driven wooden ships, 

 the hand loom, the log hut, and the good old 

 days of blissful feudalism. I am amazed 

 when I think how much we are spellbound 

 by tradition. Perhaps I have been as foot- 

 loose as any of you, yet I find myself con- 

 tinually approving of educational features 

 for no good reason except that they are 

 fashionable. We somehow seem to think 

 it means far more and is in far better form 

 to know that the nymphs gave Perseus a 

 helmet wliich Vulcan made for Pluto, and 

 which rendered him invisible, than to know 

 that Thomas A. Edison invented the in- 

 candescent lamp and made it possible for 

 Niagara Falls to light a hundred thousand 

 of them, twenty-five miles away; and yet 

 we don't believe one word of the former 



