SCIENCE. 



FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1887. 



COMMENT AND CRITICISM. 



By those who bead aright the signs of the 

 times, it is seen that important advances in edu- 

 cation are destined to be made in the not very- 

 distant future. And those advances are not to be, 

 as some have been in the past, wholly or partly 

 destructive. For a true philosophy of progress, a 

 destructive advance does not exist. The present 

 is rooted in the past, and the future will draw its 

 nourishment from the present. Any change or 

 development is conditioned by that which is 

 changed and developed. We cannot destroy pres- 

 ent conditions if we will. We may alter, amend, 

 or counteract them, but their annihilation is pos- 

 sible neither in thought nor fact. Therefore it is 

 that those educational reformers who would 

 sweep away all that now exists, before they begin 

 their work of construction, are harmful agitators. 

 They raise a demand that they cannot supply. 

 They waste time, and thought, and money. The 

 true educational progress is going to be more sci- 

 entific, more philosophic, than this. It will take 

 things as it finds them, and mould them to its 

 purpose. It is no sign of sound educational think- 

 ing to join the senseless clamor for the sweeping- 

 away of Greek, or philosophy, or every thing 

 else that cannot be at once coined into dollars and 

 cents. Utility is never going to be the test of the 

 true education. The true progress will suffer no 

 such lowering of its ideal. It will keep before it, 

 as its aim, the development of man, and the whole 

 man, as man. But it will ask whether we have 

 not overlooked some of man's faculties. It will 

 inquire with what reason we have in the past 

 instituted a feudal system among the human 

 powers, which relegates some of them to an un- 

 dignified servitude, and gives to others all the 

 honor and esteem. Have we not overstepped the 

 limits of science in this respect ? 



possibilities of development. Some senses we have 

 neglected entirely, others we have educated only 

 in part. The eye is taught to read, and the hand 

 to write, but neither is taught to draw, or to 

 mould and fashion. Many of the refinements of 

 the sense of touch are also entirely passed over. 

 To remedy these, and similar omissions in our 

 education, not destruction but construction is 

 necessary. Keep what we have that is good, but re- 

 arrange it, that the elements hitherto neglected may 

 find a place in the scheme. The education that 

 will do this, is the new education, but it is sadly 

 in need of a name. Words merely stand for 

 ideas, to be sure, but sometimes a word adds to the 

 definiteness of the idea it represents. 'Manual train- 

 ing ' will not do, for that conveys the idea of teach- 

 ing a trade. The new education will not do this. 

 ' Industrial education' will not do, though a mean- 

 ing, not explicitly conveyed by the words, may 

 be read into the phrase. Yet this means ambi- 

 guity, and ambiguity means loss of force and 

 directness. A name is wanted, but it must, to be 

 satisfactory, stand for the idea we have outlined. 

 It must not mean the training of the hand and eye 

 alone, but the training of the mind through the 

 hand and eye. And it must not exclude the older 

 instruction, which is excellent as far as it goes, 

 but which does not go far enough. It is this — the 

 old plus the new — which we mean by the new 

 education. 



Locke called the senses the ' windows of the 

 soul,' but we have, to a great extent, closed or 

 defaced those windows, without reflecting that by 

 so doing we were denying to the soul some of its 



No. 211 — 1887. 



The recent article in the Contemporary review 

 on university education in the United States, by 

 President Charles Kendall Adams of Cornell, is a 

 very clear and succinct account of the progress of 

 thought on university subjects in this country 

 during the past half century. It should be par- 

 ticularly welcome to those European students of 

 educational science who desire to understand the 

 development of educational thought in this coun- 

 try. President Adams shows very clearly that 

 the establishment of our scientific and technical 

 schools, the founding of parallel courses, as at 

 Cornell and Michigan universities, and the buUd- 

 ing-up of the elective system, as at Harvard, were 

 all the outcome of the same desire, — to satisfy 

 the increasingly critical demands as to higher 

 education. President Adams sustains President 



