380 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
tion is directed toward efficiency in some art. (Here the term art is 
used in its original and broadest sense, to include any method of action 
that is recognized and adopted as the means appropriate to achieve some 
definite, specific purpose.) We may then conclude that an education is 
liberal in so far as it makes for manhood and personality, technical in 
so far as it makes for efficiency in some art. And we proceed to con- 
sider why it is that at the present time we find the liberal opposed to 
and contrasted with the technical trend of education. 
In ancient Athens the aim set before each citizen was, fundamen- 
tally, to be a good citizen; and in mastering that art he realized also 
personality and manhood. Here the technical and the liberal in educa- 
tion seemed in perfect accord. And it was so in the Rome of Cicero 
and Quintilian, when the education of the orator was looked on as the 
fullest development of personality. And, in primitive and medieval 
Christianity, the fullest realization of the soul in that life-long educa- 
tion which should bring salvation in the knowledge and love of God was 
the very education which should fit the man also for the one supreme 
art, the extension of God’s kingdom here upon earth. So too the 
knight, the warrior of the medieval system, could not distinguish the 
education which should make him a perfect knight, from that which 
should make him a perfect man. 
During the renaissance there appeared and flourished a type of 
education which had in view the cultured gentleman, rather than the 
perfection of any art to which he might or might not apply his powers. 
“But even here the liberal was not contrasted with the technical, though 
in later times there developed from this renaissance ideal the still per- 
sistent concept of a “ gentleman” who might best attain culture when 
aloof from the general life of toil. But what is most noteworthy in the 
renaissance, whether we consider its birth in the free Italian cities, its 
culmination in Luther and Bacon, or its close in Milton, is not un- 
worthily summed up in the ideal of education which Milton himself 
thus expressed: “TI call therefore a complete and generous education 
that which fits a man to perform, justly, skillfully and magnanimously, 
all the offices both private and public of peace and war.” Still then it 
was thought that a man might attain efficiency in every art and therein 
find his perfect freedom and full realization. 
The sense of opposition between the liberal and the technical in 
education is not to be found in Huxley or in Spencer, who best express 
to us the scientific in contrast with the humanistic vision of liberal 
education. Indeed, both these men were criticized, even in their own 
day, for failure to see that to be “ in harmony with nature ” or to strive 
after a comprehensive knowledge of the various fields of science is not 
the best preparation for most occupations, and is indeed hardly possible 
in view of the necessity for the thorough acquaintance with some limited 
field of science and knowledge which modern conditions seem to demand. 
