2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



rising generation, to act the part and perform the duties of free intel- 

 lectual, and moral "beings. So far as the nature of the human mind 

 and the foundations of human knowledge remain the same from ao-e to 

 age and generation to generation, a liberal education is the same thing 

 in every age and generation ; so far as the condition of society varies 

 from age to age, and as the accumulated capital of extant knowledge 

 increases, the liberal education of one generation will differ from that 

 of another. There are, therefore, both constant and variable factors 

 in our problem. It is with the variable factors, as modifying our con- 

 ception of the liberal education of the nineteenth century, that I have 

 here chiefly to do. 



I reckon five leading influences which are acting powerfully to 

 modify all our old theories, and slowly working out a new ideal of 

 liberal education : 1. A truer psychology, giving us for the first time 

 a true theory of elementary teaching. 2. Progress in the science of 

 philology, enabling us to assign their right position to the classical 

 languages as elements in liberal culture, and giving us, in modern 

 philological science, an improved and more powerful teaching instru- 

 ment. 3. The first real attempt to combine republican ideas with the 

 theory of liberal education — in other words, to make the education of 

 the whole people liberal, instead of merely the education of certain 

 privileged classes and protected professions. And when I say the 

 whole people, I mean men and women. Nothing, I will say in pass- 

 ing, to my mind so marks us. as still educational barbarians, so stamps 

 all our boasted culture with illiberality, as an exclusion of the other 

 sex from all share in its privileges. ~No education can be truly liberal 

 which is not equally applicable to one sex as to the other. 4. As the 

 influence more profoundly modifying our conceptions of liberal educa- 

 tion than any other, I reckon the advent of modern physical science. 

 5. I count among those influences the growing perception that art and 

 aesthetic culture are equally necessary as an element in all education 

 worthy of the name. Let me give the few words, which are all the 

 time will allow me, to each of these influences. 



And, first, the advance we have been making toward a truer edu- 

 cation-philosophy, based upon truer conceptions in regard to the 

 growth and early development of the human mind, is pretty well dis- 

 posing of what, perhaps, I may be permitted to call the old-fashioned, 

 grindstone-theory of elementary education ; the doctrine, namely, that,- 

 as preparation for higher culture, all youthful minds require a certain 

 preliminary process of sharpening upon certain studies, valueless or 

 next to valueless in themselves, at least so far as regards the vast ma- 

 jority of their recipients, but quite as needful, nevertheless, to them as 

 to all others who are hereafter to be considered as liberally educated, 

 for the indirect benefit their pursuit was supposed to confer. The ac- 

 cepted theory of liberal education has heretofore been, that it was a 

 certain very special kind of training which required this peculiar pre- 



