FOOTNOTES:
But a great deal of the expense also. How much larger the staff of teachers must be where everything is taught to anybody than where a few subjects are offered to all, may be seen by comparing the number of teachers at Harvard—146, instructing 1586 men—with those of Glasgow University in 1878—42, instructing 2018 men.
Or sixteen per cent of his recitations. Readers may like to compare this result with the number of absences elsewhere. At a prominent New England college, one of the best of those which require attendance, a student is excused from ten per cent of his exercises. But this amount does not cover absences of necessity,—absences caused by sickness, by needs of family, and by the many other perfectly legitimate hindrances to attendance. The percentage given for the Harvard seniors includes all absences whatsoever.
IX
ERRONEOUS LIMITATIONS OF THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM
In a paper published in the Andover Review a year ago, I called attention to the fact that a new principle is at work in American education. That principle, briefly stated, is this: the student now consciously shares in his own upbuilding. His studies are knitted closely to his personal life. Under this influence a new species of power is developed. Scholarship broadens and deepens, boyishness diminishes, teacher and pupil meet less artificially. The college, as an institution, wins fresh life. Public confidence awakens; pupils, benefactions, flow in. Over what I wrote an eager controversy has arisen, a controversy which must have proved instructive to those who need instruction most. In the last resort questions of education are decided by educators, as those of sanitation by sanitary engineers; but in both cases the decision has reference to public needs, and people require to be instructed in the working of appliances which are designed for their comfort. There is danger that such instruction may not be given. Professional men become absorbed in their art and 201 content themselves with reticence, leaving the public ignorant of the devices by which its health is to be preserved. A great opportunity, therefore, comes to the common householder when these professional men fall foul of one another. In pressing arguments home they frequently take to ordinary speech, and anybody who then lends an ear learns of the mysteries. The present discussion, I am sure, has brought this informatory gain to every parent who reads the Andover Review and has a studious boy. The gain will have been greater because of the candor and courtesy with which the attacking party has delivered its assault. The contest has been earnest. Its issues have been rightly judged momentous. For good or for ill, the choice youth of the land are to be shaped by whatever educational policy finally wins. Yet, so far as I recall, no unkind word has slipped from the pen of one of my stout opponents; no disparagement of man or college has mixed with the energetic advocacy of principle; the discussion has set in well toward things. I cannot call this remarkable. Of course it is not easy to be fair and strong at once. Sweetness and light are often parted. Yet we rightly expect the scholar’s life to civilize him who pursues it, and we anticipate from books a refinement of the spirit and the manners as well as the understanding. My opponents have been scholars, and have spoken as scholars speak. It is a pleasure 202 to linger in their kindly contentious company. So I gladly accept the invitation of the editors of the Review to sum up our discussion and to add some explanatory last words.
The papers which have appeared fall into two easily distinguishable classes, the descriptive and the critical. To the former I devote but a brief space, so much more direct is the bearing of the latter on the main topic of debate—the question, namely, what course the higher education can and what it cannot now take. Yet the descriptive papers perform a service and deserve a welcome word. Suspecting that I was showing off Harvard rather favorably, professors planted elsewhere have attempted to make an equally favorable exhibit of their own colleges. In my manifesto they have seen “a coveted opportunity to bring forward corresponding statistics which have not been formed under the Harvard method.” Perhaps this was to mistake my aim a little. I did intend to advance my college in public esteem; she deserves that of me in everything I write. But primarily I thought of myself as the expounder of an important policy, which happens to have been longer perceived and more elaborately studied at Harvard than elsewhere. I hope I did not imply that Harvard, having this excellence, has all others. She has many weaknesses, which should not be shielded from discerning discussion. Nor did I intend to commit 203 the injustice to Harvard—an injustice as gross as it is frequent—of treating her as a mere embodiment of the elective system. Harvard is a complex and august institution, possessed of all the attractions which can be lent by age, tradition, learning, continually renewed resources, fortunate situation, widespread clientage, enthusiastic loyalty, and forceful guidance. She is the intellectual mother of us all, honored certainly by me, and I believe by thousands of others, for a multiplicity of subtle influences which stretch far outside her special modes of instruction. But for the last half-century Harvard has been developing a new and important policy of education. Coincident with this development she has attained enormous popular esteem and internal power. The value and limits of this policy, the sources of this esteem and power, I wish everybody, colleges and populace, to scrutinize. To make these things understood is to help the higher education everywhere.
In undertaking this quasi philosophical task, I count it a piece of good fortune to have provoked so many lucid accounts of what other colleges are doing. The more of these the better. The public cannot be too persistently reminded of the distinctive merits of this college and of that. Let each be as zealous as possible; gains made by one are gains for all. Depreciatory rivalry between colleges is as silly as it is 204 when religious sects quarrel in the midst of a perishing world. Probably such rivalries have their rise in the dull supposition that a fixed constituency of pupils exists somewhere, which if not turned toward one college may be drawn to another. As the old political economists tell of a “wages fund,” fixed and constant in each community, so college governors are apt to imagine a public pupil-hoard, not susceptible of much increase or diminution, which may by inadvertence fall into other hands than their own. In reality each college creates its constituency. Its students come, in the main, from the inert mass of the uncollegiate public. Only one in eight among Harvard students is a son of a Harvard graduate; and probably the small colleges beget afresh an even larger percentage of their students. On this account the small colleges have been a power in the land. To disparage them shall never be my office. In a larger degree than the great universities they spread the college idea among people who would not otherwise possess it. The boy who lives within fifty miles of one of them reflects whether he will or will not have a college training. Were there no college in the neighborhood, he might never consider the matter at all. It is natural enough for undergraduates to decry every college except their own; but those who love education generously, and who seek to spread it far and wide, cannot afford the luxury of envy. 205 One common danger besetting us all should bind us together. In the allurements of commerce boys may forget that college is calling. They do forget it. According to my computations the number of persons in the New England colleges to-day is about the same as the number in the insane asylums; but little more than the number of idiots. Probably this number is not increasing in proportion to population. Professor Newton, of Oberlin, finds that the increase of students during the ten years between 1870 and 1880, in twenty of our oldest leading colleges, was less than three and a half per cent, the population of the United States increasing during the same period twenty-three per cent. In view of facts like these, careful study of the line along which college growth is still possible becomes a necessity. It will benefit all colleges alike. No one engaged in it has a side to maintain. We are all alike seekers. Whatever instructive experience any college can contribute to the common study, and whatever pupils she may thereby gain, will be matter for general rejoicing.
To such a study the second, or critical, class of papers furnishes important stimulus; for these have not confined themselves to describing institutions: they have gone on to discuss the value and limits of the principle which actuates the new education everywhere. In many respects their writers and I 206 are in full accord. In moral aim we always are, and generally too in our estimate of the present status. We all confess that the conditions of college education have changed, that the field of knowledge has enlarged, that a liberal training nowadays must fit men for more than the four professions of preaching, teaching, medicine, and law. We agree that the prescribed systems of the past are outgrown. We do not want them. We doubt whether they were well suited to their own time; we are sure they will never fit ours. Readjustments of curricula, we all declare, must be undertaken if the higher education is to retain its hold on our people. Further still, we agree in the direction of this readjustment. My critics, no less than I, believe that a widely extended scope must be given to individual choice. With the possible exception of Professor Denison, about whose opinion I am uncertain, everybody who has taken part in the controversy recognizes the elective principle as a beneficial one and maintains that in some form or other it has come to stay, People generally are not aware what a consensus of opinion on this point late years have brought about. To rid ourselves once for all of further controversy let us weigh well the words of my opponents.
Mr. Brearley begins his criticism addressed to the New York Harvard Club thus: “We premise that every one accepts the elective principle. Some system 207 based on that principle must be established. No one wants the old required systems back, or any new required system.” Professor Howison says: “An elective system, in its proper place, and under its due conditions, is demonstrably sound.” Professor Ladd does not express himself very fully on this point in the Andover Review, but his opinions may be learned from the New Englander for January, 1885. When, in 1884, Yale College reformed its curriculum and introduced elective studies, it became desirable to instruct the graduates about the reasons for a step which had been long resisted. After a brief trial of the new system, Professor Ladd published his impressions of it. I strongly commend his candid paper to the attention of those who still believe the old methods the safer. He asserts that “a perfect and final course of college study is, if not an unattainable ideal, at present an impossible achievement.” The considerations which were “the definite and almost compulsory reasons for instituting a comprehensive change” he groups under the following heads: (1) the need of modern languages; (2) the crowding of studies in the senior year; (3) the heterogeneous and planless character of the total course; (4) the need of making allowance for the tastes, the contemplated pursuits, and the aptitudes of the individual student. Substantially, these are the evils of prescription which I pointed out; only, in my view, 208 they are evils not confined to a single year. Stating his observation of the results of election, Professor Ladd says: “Increased willingness in study, and even a new and marked enthusiasm on the part of a considerable number of students, is another effect of the new course already realized. The entire body of students in the upper classes is more attentive, regular, interested, and even eager, than ever before.” “More intimate and effective relations are secured in many cases between teachers and pupils.”
These convictions in regard to the efficiency which the elective principle lends to education are not confined to my critics and myself. Let me cite testimony from representatives of other colleges. The last Amherst Catalogue records (page 24) that “excellent results have appeared from this [the elective] method. The special wants of the student are thus met, his zest and progress in his work are increased, and his association with his teachers becomes thus more close and intimate.” President Robinson says, in his annual report for 1885 to the Corporation of Brown University: “There are advantages in a carefully guarded system of optional studies not otherwise obtainable. The saving of time in preparing for a special calling in life is something, and the cumulative zeal in given lines of study, where a gratified and growing taste is ever beckoning onward, is still more. But above all, some provision for 209 choice among ever-multiplying courses of study has become a necessity.” In addressing the American Institute of Instruction at Bar Harbor, July 7, 1886, Professor A. S. Hardy, of Dartmouth, is reported as saying: “Every educator now recognizes the fact that individual characteristics are always sufficiently marked to demand his earliest attention; and, furthermore, that there is a stage in the process of education where the choice, the responsibility, and the freedom of the individual should have a wide scope.” President Adams, in his inaugural address at Cornell in 1885, asserted that “there are varieties of gifts, call them, if you will, fundamental differences, that make it impossible to train successfully all of a group of boys to the same standard. These differences are partly matters of sheer ability, and partly matters of taste; for if a boy has so great an aversion to a given study that he can never be brought to apply himself to it with some measure of fondness, he is as sure not to succeed in it as he would be if he were lacking the requisite mental capacity.”
In determining, then, what the new education may wisely be, let this be considered settled: it must contain a large element of election. That is the opinion of these unbiased judges. They find personal choice necessary for promoting a wider range of topics in the college, a greater zeal on the part of 210 the student, and more suitable relations between teacher and pupil. With this judgment I, of course, heartily agree, though I should make more prominent the moral reason of the facts. I should insist that a right character and temper in the receiving mind is always a prerequisite of worthy study.[6] But I misrepresent these gentlemen if I allow their testimony to stop here. They maintain that the elective principle as thus far carried out, though valuable, is still meagre and one-sided. They do not think it will be found self-sufficing and capable of guarding its own working. They see that it has dangers peculiar to itself, and believe that to escape 211 them it will require to be restricted and furnished with supplemental influences. I believe so too. Choice is important, but it is also important that one should choose well. The individual is sacred, but only so far as he is capable of recognizing the sacredness of laws which he has had no part in making. Unrestricted arbitrary choice is indistinguishable from chaos; and undoubtedly every method of training which avoids mechanism and includes choice as a factor leaves a door open in the direction of chaos. Infinite Wisdom left that door open when man was created. To dangers from this source I am fully alive. I totally dissent from those advocates of the elective system who would identify it with a laissez-faire policy. The cry that we must let nature take care of itself is a familiar one in trade, in art, in medicine, in social relations, in the religious life, in education; but in the long run it always proves inadequate. Man is a personal spirit, a director, a being fitted to compare and to organize forces, not to take them as they rise, like a creature of nature. The future will certainly not tolerate an education less organic than that of the past; but just as certainly will it demand that the organic tie shall be a living one,—one whose bond may assist those whom it restricts to become spontaneous, forcible, and diverse. If I am offered only the alternative of absolutism or laissez-faire, I choose laissez-faire. Out of chaotic 212 nature beautiful forms do continually come forth. But absolutism kills in the cradle. It cannot tolerate a life that is imperfect, and so it stifles what it should nourish.
Up to this point my critics and I have walked hand in hand. Henceforth we part company. I shall not follow out all our little divergencies. My object from the first has been to trace the line along which education may now proceed. It must, it seems, be a line including election; but election limited how? To disentangle an answer to this vexed question, I pass by the many points in which my critics have shown that I am foolish, and the few others in which I might show them so, and turn to the fundamental issue between us, our judgment of what the supplemental influences are which will render personal initiative safe. Personal initiative is assured. The authoritative utterances I have just quoted show that it can never again be expelled from American colleges. But what checks are compatible with it? Accepting choice, what treatment will render it continually wiser? Here differences of judgment begin to appear, and here I had hoped to receive light from my critics. The question is one where coöperative experience is essential. But those who have written against me seem hardly to have realized its importance. They generally confine themselves to showing how bad my plans are, and merely hint at 213 better ones which they themselves might offer. But what are these plans? Wise ways of training boys are of more consequence than Harvard misdeeds. We want to hear of a constructive policy which can take a young man of nineteen and so train him in self-direction that four years later he may venture out alone into a perplexing, and for the most part hostile, world. The thing to be done is to teach boys how to manage themselves. Admit that the Harvard discipline does not do this perfectly at present; what will do it better? Here we are at an educational crisis. We stand with this aim of self-guidance in our hands. What are we going to do with it? It is as dangerous as a bomb. But we cannot drop it. It is too late to objurgate. It is better to think calmly what possible modes of treatment are still open. When railroads were found dangerous, men did not take to stage-coaches again; they only studied railroading the more.
Now in the mass of negative criticism which the last year has produced I detect three positive suggestions, three ways in which it is thought limitation may be usefully applied to supplement the inevitable personal initiative. These modes of limitation, it is true, are not worked out with any fulness of practical detail, as if their advocates were convinced that the future was with them. Rather they are thrown out as hints of what might be desirable if facts and 214 the public would not interfere. But as they seem to be the only conceivable modes of restricting the elective principle by any species of outside checkage, I propose to devote the remainder of this paper to an examination of their feasibility. In a subsequent paper I shall indicate what sort of corrective appears to me more likely to prove congruous and lasting.
I. The first suggestion is that the elective principle should be limited from beneath. Universities and schools are to advance their grade, so that finally the universities will secure three or four years of purely elective study, while the schools, in addition to their present labors, will take charge of the studies formerly prescribed by the college. The schools, in short, are to become German gymnasia, and the colleges to delay becoming universities until this regeneration of the schools is accomplished.[7] A certain 215 “sum of topics” is said to be essential to the culture of the man and the citizen. In the interest of church and state, young minds must be provided with certain “fact forms,” with a “common consciousness,” a “common basis of humanism.” Important as personal election is, to allow it to take place before this common basis is laid is “to strike a blow at the historic substance of civilization.” How extensive this common consciousness is to be may be learned from Professor Howison’s remark that “languages, classical and modern; mathematics, in all its general conceptions, thoroughly apprehended; physics, acquired in a similar manner, and the other natural sciences, though with much less of detail; history and politics; literature, especially of the mother tongue, but, indispensably, the masterpieces in other languages, particularly the classic; philosophy, in the thorough elements of psychology, logic, metaphysics, and ethics, each historically treated, and economics, in the history of elementary principles, must all enter into any education that can claim to be liberal.”
The practical objections to this monarchical scheme are many. I call attention to three only.
In the first place, the argument on which it is based proves too much. If we suppose a common consciousness to be a matter of such importance, and that it cannot be secured except by sameness of studies, then that state is criminally careless which allows ninety-nine hundredths of its members to get an individual consciousness by the simple expedient of never entering college. The theory seems to demand that every male—and why not female?—between sixteen and twenty be indoctrinated in “the essential subject-matters,” without regard to what he or she may personally need to know or do. This is the plan of religious teaching adopted by the Roman Church, which enforces its “fact forms” of doctrine on all alike; without securing, however, by this means, according to the judgment of the outside world, any special freshness of religious life. I do not believe the results would be better in the higher secular culture, and I should be sorry to see Roman methods applied there; but if they are to be applied, let them fall impartially on all members of the community. To put into swaddling clothes the man who is wise enough to seek an education, and to leave his duller brother to kick about as he pleases, seems a little arbitrary.
But secondly, there is no more prospect of persuading 217 our high schools to accept the prescribed subjects of the colleges than there is of persuading our government to transform itself into the German. Already the high schools and the colleges are unhappily drawing apart. The only hope of their nearer approach is in the remission by the colleges of some of the more burdensome subjects at present exacted. Paid for by common taxation, these schools are called on to equip the common man for his daily struggle. That they will one day devote themselves to laying the foundations of an ideally best education for men of leisure is grotesquely improbable. Although Harvard draws rather more than one-third of her students from states outside New England, the whole number of students who have come to her from the high schools of these states, during a period of the last ten years, is but sixty-six. Fitting for college is becoming an alarmingly technical matter, and is falling largely into the hands of private tutors and academies.
It may be said, however, thirdly, that it is just these academies which might advantageously take the present freshmen and sophomore studies. They would thus become the exclusive avenues to the university of the future, leaving it free to do its own proper work with elective studies. Considering the great expense which this lengthening of the curriculum of the academy implies, it is plain that the number 218 of schools capable of fitting boys in this way would always be small. These few academies, with their monopoly of learned training, would lose their present character and be erected into little colleges,—colleges of a second grade. That any such thing is likely to occur, I do not believe; but if it were, would it aid the higher education and promote its wide dispersion? Precisely the contrary. Instead of going to the university from the academies, boys would content themselves with the tolerable education already received. For the most part they would decline to go farther. It is useless to say that this does not happen in Germany, where the numbers resorting to the university are so large as to have become the subject of complaint; for the German government, controlling as it does all access to the professions, is able to force through the gymnasia and through special courses at the university a body of young men who would otherwise be seeking their fortunes elsewhere. Whether such control would be desirable in this country, I will not consider. Some questions are not feasible even for discussion. But it is to English experience we must look to see what our case would be. The great public schools of England—Eton, Rugby, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, Cheltenham—are of no higher order than under the proposed plan Andover and Exeter would become. From these two academies nearly ninety-five 219 per cent of the senior classes now enter some college. But of the young men graduating from the English schools named, so far as I can ascertain, less than fifty per cent go to the university. With the greater pressure toward commercial life in this country, the number would certainly be less than in England. To build up colleges of a second grade, and to permit none but those who have passed them to enter colleges of the first, is to cut off the higher education from nearly all those who do not belong to the privileged classes; it is to make the “common consciousness” less common, and to turn it, even more effectually than at present, into the consciousness of a clique. He who must make a living for himself or for others cannot afford to reach his profession late. The age of entering college is already too high. With improved methods of teaching I hope it maybe somewhat reduced. At any rate, every study now added to the high schools or academies is a fresh barrier between education and the people.
II. If, then, by prescribing a large amount of study outside the university the elective principle is not likely to be successfully limited, is it not probable that within the college itself the two counter principles of election and prescription, mutually limiting, mutually supporting, will always be retained? This is the second suggestion; to bring studies of choice and studies commanded into juxtaposition. The 220 backbone of the college is to be kept prescribed, the fleshy parts to be made elective. By a special modification of the plan, the later years are turned largely, perhaps wholly, toward election, and a line is drawn at the junior, or even the sophomore year, below which elective studies are forbidden to penetrate. Is not this the plan that will finally be judged safest? It certainly is the safest for a certain number of years. Before it can securely reach anything else, every college must pass through this intermediate state. After half a century of testing election Harvard still retains some prescribed studies. The Harvard juniors chose for nineteen years before the sophomores, and the sophomores seventeen years before the freshmen. In introducing electives a sober pace is commendable. A university is charged with the greatest of public trusts. The intelligence of the community is, to a large extent, in its keeping. It is bound to keep away from risky experiments, to disregard shifting popular fancies, and to be as conservative as clearness of sight will permit. I do not plead, therefore, that Harvard and Yale should abolish all prescription the coming year. They certainly should not. In my opinion most colleges are moving too fast in the elective direction already. I merely plead that we must see where we are going. As public guides, we must forecast the track of the future if we would avoid stumbling into paths which lead nowhere. 221 That is all I am attempting here. I want to ascertain whether the dual system of limitation is a stable system, one in which we can put our trust, or whether it is a temporary convenience, likely to slip away a little year after year. What does history say? Let us examine the facts of the past. The following table shows at the left the fifteen New England colleges. In the next three parallel columns is printed the percentage of elective studies which existed in these colleges in 1875-76; in the last three, the percentage which exists to-day. To render the comparison more exact, I print the sophomore, junior, and senior years separately, reserving the problem of the freshman year for later discussion.
| 1875-76 | 1885-86 | |||||
| Soph. | Jun. | Sen. | Soph. | Jun. | Sen. | |
| Amherst | .04 | .20 | .08 | .20 | .75 | .75 |
| Bates | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Boston | 0 | 0 | 0 | .35 | .66 | .82 |
| Bowdoin | 0 | 0 | 0 | .15 | .25 | .25 |
| Brown | 0 | .04 | .04 | .14 | .37 | .55 |
| Colby | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | .08 | .16 |
| Dartmouth | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | .41 | .36 |
| Harvard | .50 | .78 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 |
| Middlebury | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Trinity | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | .25 | .25 |
| Tufts | 0 | .17 | .17 | 0 | .28 | .43 |
| Vermont | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Wesleyan | 0 | .47 | .47 | .16 | .47 | .64 |
| Williams | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | .37 |
| Yale | 0 | 0 | 0 | .13 | .53 | .80 |
This table yields four conclusions: (1) A rapid and fateful revolution is going on in the higher education of New England. We do not exaggerate the change when we speak of an old education and a new. (2) The spread of it is in tolerable proportion to the wealth of the college concerned. The new modes are expensive. It is not disapproval which is holding the colleges back; it is inability to meet the cost. I am sorry to point out this fact. To my mind one of the gravest perplexities of the new education is the query, What are the small colleges to do? They have a usefulness altogether peculiar; yet from the life-giving modern methods of training they are of necessity largely cut off. (3) The colleges which long ago foresaw their coming necessities have been able to proceed more cautiously than those which acknowledged them late. (4) The movement is one of steady advance. There is no going back. It must be remembered, too, that the stablest colleges have been proceeding with these changes many more years than the period shown in the table. Are we, then, prepared to dismiss prejudice from our minds and to recognize what steadiness of advance means? In other matters when a general tendency in a given direction is discovered, extending over a long series of years, visible in individuals widely unlike, and presenting no solitary case of backward turning, we are apt to conclude that there is a force in the movement 223 which will carry it still further onward. We are not disposed to seize on some point in its path and to count that an ultimate holding-ground. This, I say, would be a natural conclusion unless we could detect in the movement tendencies at work in an opposite direction. Are there any such tendencies here? I cannot find them. Prescription invariably loses; election invariably gains.
But in order to make a rational prediction about the future we must know more than the bare facts of the past; we need to know why these particular facts have arisen. What are the reasons that whenever elective and prescribed studies are mixed, an extrusive force regularly appears in the elective? The reasons are not far to seek. Probably every professor in New England understands them. The two systems are so incongruous that each brings out the vices rather than the virtues of its incompatible brother. Prescribed studies, side by side with elective, appear a bondage; elective, side by side with prescribed, an indulgence. So long as all studies are prescribed, one may be set above another in the mind of the pupil on grounds of intrinsic worth; let certain studies express the pupil’s wishes, and almost certainly the remainder, valuable as they may be in themselves, will express his disesteem. It is useless to say this should not be so. It always is. The zeal of work, the freshness of interest, which now appear in the 224 chosen studies, are deducted from those which are forced. On the latter as little labor as possible is expended. They become perfunctory and mechanical, and soon restive pupils and dissatisfied teachers call for fresh extension of energizing choice. This is why the younger officers in all the colleges are eager to give increased scope to the elective studies. They cannot any longer get first-rate work done in the prescribed. Alarmed by the dangers of the new principle, as they often and justly are, they find that the presence of prescription, instead of diminishing the dangers, adds another and a peculiarly enfeebling one to those which existed before. So certain are these dangers, and so inevitable the expanding power of the elective principle, that it is questionable whether it would not be wise for a college to refuse to have anything to do with elective studies so soon as it knows itself too weak to allow them to spread.
For where will the spreading stop? It cannot stop till the causes of it stop. The table just given shows no likelihood of its stopping at all, and a little reflection will show that each enlargement increases the reasons for another enlargement still. If prescribed studies are ever exceptional, ineffective, and obnoxious, they certainly become more so as they diminish in number. A college which retains one of them is in a condition of unstable equilibrium. But is this true of the freshman year? Will not a 225 special class of considerations keep prescription enduring and influential there, long after it has lost its usefulness in the later years? A boy of nineteen comes from home about as untrained in will as in intelligence. Will it not always be thought best to give him a year in which to acquaint himself with his surroundings and to learn what studies he may afterwards profitably select? Possibly it will. I incline to think not. The case of the freshman year is undoubtedly peculiar. Taking a large body of colleges, we have direct evidence that during their last three years the elective principle steadily wins and never loses. We have but a trifle of such evidence as regards the freshman year. There the struggle of the two forces has barely begun. It has begun at Harvard, and the usual result is already foreshadowed. The prescribed studies are disparaged studies; they are not worked at the best advantage. Still, I do not like to prophesy on evidence so narrow. I will merely say I see no reason to suppose that colleges will meet with permanent success in mingling incompatible kinds of study in their freshman year. But I can only surmise. Let any college that inclines to try the experiment do so.
It may be thought, however, a wiser course to keep the freshman year untouched by choice. A solid year of prescription is thus secured as a limitation on the election that is to follow. This plan is so 226 often advised, especially by persons unacquainted with the practical working of colleges, that it requires a brief examination by itself.
Let us suppose the revolution which we have traced in the sophomore, junior, and senior years to have reached its natural terminus; let us suppose that in these years all studies have become elective, while the freshman year remains completely prescribed; the college will then fall into two parts, a preparatory department and a university department. In these two departments the character of the instruction, the methods of study, the consciousness of the students, will be altogether dissimilar. The freshmen will not be taken by upper classmen as companions; they will be looked down upon as children. Hazing will find abundant excuse. An abrupt line will be drawn, on whose farther side freedom will lie, on whose hither side, bondage. The sophomore, a being who at best has his peculiarities, will find his sense of self-sufficiency doubled. Whatever badly-bred boy parents incline to send to college will seem to them safe enough for a year, and they will suppose that during this period he will learn how to behave. Of course he will learn nothing of the sort. Manly discipline has not yet begun. At the end of the freshman year a boy will be only so much less a boy as increase of age may make him. Through being forced to study mathematics this year there comes no sustaining 227 influence fitted to fortify the judgment when one is called the next year to choose between Greek and German. On the contrary, the change from school methods to maturing methods is rendered as dangerous as possible by allowing it to take place quite nakedly, by itself, unsupported by other changes, and at the mere dictation of the almanac. An emancipation so bare and sudden is not usual elsewhere. For boys who do not go to college, departure from home is commonly recognized as a fit occasion for putting on that dangerous garment, the toga virilis. Entrance to the university constitutes a similar epoch, when change of residence, new companions, altered conditions of living, a realization that the old supports are gone, and the presumption with which every one now meets the youth that he is to be treated as a man among men, become helpful influences coöperating to ease the hard and inevitable transition from parental control to personal self-direction. A safer time for beginning individual responsibility cannot be found. At any rate, whether my diagnosis of reasons is correct or not, the fact is clear,—self-respecting colleges do not tolerate preparatory departments. They do not work well. They are an element of weakness in the institution which harbors them. Even where at first they are judged necessary, so soon as the college grows strong they are dropped. When we attempt to plan an 228 education for times to come, we must bear in mind established facts. Turn the freshman year into a preparatory department, fill it with studies antithetic in aim, method, and spirit to those of later years, and something is established which no sober college ever permitted to remain long within its borders. This is the teaching of the past without an exception. To suppose the future will be different is but the blind hope of a timid transitionalism.
III. The third suggestion for restricting election is the group system. This deserves a more respectful treatment than the methods hitherto discussed, for it is something more than a suggestion: it is a system, a constructive plan of education, thought out in all its parts, and directed toward an intended end. The definition which I have elsewhere offered of the elective system, that it demands a fixed quantity and quality of study with variable topic, would be applicable also to the group system. Accordingly it belongs to the new education rather than to the old. No less than the elective system it is opposed to the methods of restriction thus far described. These latter methods attempt to limit election by the ballast of an alien principle lodged beneath it or by its side. They put a weight of prescription into the preparatory schools, into the early college years, or into parallel lines of study extending throughout the college course. The source of their practical trouble 229 lies here: the two principles, election and prescription, are nowhere united; they remain sundered and at war, unserviceable for each other’s defects. The group system intertwines them. It permits choice in everything, but at the same time prescribes everything. This it effects by enlarging the unit of choice and prescribing its constituent factors. A group or block of studies is offered for choice, not a single study. All the studies of a group must be taken if any are, the “if” being the only matter left for the student to settle. The group may include all the studies open to a student at the university. One decision may determine his entire course. Or, as in the somewhat analogous arrangement of the English universities, one group may be selected at the beginning and another in the middle of the university life. The group itself is sometimes contrived so as to allow an individual variation; different students read different books; a special phase of philosophy, history, or science receives prominence. But the boundaries of the group cannot be crossed. All the studies selected by the college authorities to form a single group must be taken; no others can be.
In this method of limiting choice there is much that is attractive. I feel that attraction strongly. Under the exceptional conditions which exist at the Johns Hopkins University, a group system has done excellent work. Like all the rest of the world, I 230 honor that work and admire its wise directors. But group systems seem to me to possess features too objectionable to permit them to become the prevalent type of the future, and I do not see how these features can be removed without abandoning what is distinctive, and changing the whole plan into the elective system, pure and simple. The objectionable features connect themselves with the size of the unit of choice, with difficulties in the construction of the groups, and with the attempt to enforce specialization. But these are enigmatic phrases; let me explain them.
Obviously, for the young, foresight is a hard matter. While disciplining them in the intricate art of looking ahead, I should think it wise to furnish frequently a means of repairing errors. Penalties for bad choices should not be too severe. Now plainly the larger the unit of choice, the graver the consequences of erroneous judgment. The group system takes a large unit, a body of studies; the simple elective system, a small unit, the single study. Errors of choice are consequently less reparable under the group system than under pure election. To meet this difficulty the college course at Baltimore has been reduced from four years to three; but even so, a student who selects a group for which he finds himself unfit cannot bring himself into proper adjustment without the loss of a year. If he does not discover his unfitness 231 until the second year has begun, he loses two years. Under the elective system, the largest possible penalty for a single mistake is the loss of a single study, one quarter of a year’s work. This necessary difference in ease of reparability appears to me to mark an inferiority in group systems, considered as methods of educating choice. To the public it may seem otherwise. I am often astonished to find people approving irreparable choices and condemning reparable ones. That youths between nineteen and twenty-three should select studies for themselves shocks many people who look kindly enough on marriages contracted during those years. Boys still unbearded have a large share in deciding whether they will go to college, to a scientific school, to a store, to sea, or to a cattle-ranch. Their lives are staked on the wisdom of the step taken. Yet the American mode of meeting these family problems seems to our community, on the whole, safer than the English way of regulating them by tradition and dictation. The choice with heavy stakes of the boy who does not go to college is frequently set off favorably against the choices with light stakes of the boy who goes. Perhaps a similarly lenient judgment will in the long run be passed on the great stakes involved in group systems. I doubt it. I think it will ultimately be judged less dangerous and more maturing to grant a young man, in his passage through a period 232 of moral discipline, frequent opportunities of repair.
Again, the practical difficulties of deciding what groups shall be formed are enormous. What studies shall enter into each? How many groups shall there be? If but one, we have the old-fashioned college with no election. If two, we have the plan which Yale has just abandoned, a fixed undergraduate department maintained in parallel vigor with a fixed scientific school. But in conceding the claims of variety even to this degree, we have treated the fundamental differences between man and man as worthy, not reprehensible; and can we say that the proper differences are only two? Must we not acknowledge a world at least as complex as that they have in Baltimore, where there appear to be seven reputable species of mankind: “Those who wish a good classical training; those who look toward a course in medicine; those who prefer mathematical studies with reference to engineering, astronomy, and teaching; those who wish an education in scientific studies, not having chosen a specialty; those who expect to pursue a course in theology; those who propose to study law; those who wish a literary training not rigidly classical.” Here a classification of human wishes is attempted, but one suspects that there are legitimate wishes which lie outside the scheme. It does not, for example, at once appear why a prospective 233 chemist should be debarred from all regular study of mathematics. It seems hard that a youth of literary tastes should be cut off from Greek at entrance unless he will agree to take five exercises in it each week throughout his college course. One does not feel quite easy in allowing nobody but a lawyer or a devotee of modern languages to read a page of English or American history. The Johns Hopkins programme is the most ingenious and the most flexible contrivance for working a group system that I have ever seen. For this reason I mention it as the most favorable type of all. Considering its purposes, I do not believe it can be much improved. As applied to its little band of students, 116, it certainly works few hardships. Yet all the exclusions I have named, and many more besides, appear in it. I instance these simply to show what barriers to knowledge the best group system erects. Remove these, and others quite as great are introduced. Try to avoid them by allowing the student of one group to take certain studies in another, and the sole line which parts the group system from the elective is abandoned. In practice, it usually is abandoned. Confronted with the exigencies of operation, the so-called group system turns into an elective system, with highly specialized lines of study strongly recommended. With this more genial working I have nothing now to do. My point is this: a system of hard 234 and fast groups presents difficulties of construction and maintenance too great to recommend it to the average college of the future as the best mode of limiting the elective principle.
Probably, however, this difficulty will chiefly be felt by persons engaged in the actual work of educational organization. The outer public will think it a more serious objection that grouped colleges are in reality professional schools carried down to the limits of boyhood. So far as they hold by their groups, they are nurseries of specialization. That this is necessarily so may not at first be apparent. A little consideration of the contrast in aim between group systems and prescribed will make the matter plain. Prescribed systems have gained their long hold on popular confidence by aiming at harmonious culture. They argue, justly enough, that each separate sort of knowledge furnishes something of its own to the making of a man. This particular “something,” they say, can be had from no other source. The sum of these “somethings” constitutes a rounded whole. The man who has not experienced each of them in some degree, however small, is imperfectly planned. One who has been touched by all has laid the foundations of a liberal education. Degree of acquaintance with this subject or with that may subsequently enlarge. Scholarly interest may concentrate. But at the first, the proper aim is balanced knowledge, 235 harmonious development of all essential powers, avoidance of one-sidedness.
On this aim the group system bestows but a secondary attention. Regarding primarily studies, not men, it attempts to organize single connected departments of knowledge. Accordingly it permits only those studies to be pursued together which immediately cohere. It lays out five, ten, any number of paths through the field of knowledge, and to one of these paths the pilgrim is confined. Each group constitutes a specialty,—a specialty intensified in character as, in order to escape the difficulties of maintenance just pointed out, the number of groups is allowed to increase. By insistence on specialization regard for general culture is driven into a subordinate place. The advocates of prescription maintain that there are not half a dozen ground-plans of perfected humanity. They say there is but one. If we introduce variety of design into a curriculum, we neglect that ideal man who resides alike in all. We trust, on the contrary, in our power to hit some line of study which may deservedly appeal to one human being while not so appealing to another. We simply note the studies which are most congruous with the special line selected, and by this congruity we shape our group. In the new aim, congruity of studies, adaptation to a professional purpose, takes precedence of harmonious development of powers.
I have no doubt that specialization is destined to become more marked in the American education of the future. It must become so if we are to produce the strong departmental scholars who illuminate learning in other countries; indeed, it must become so if we are to train competent experts for the affairs of daily life. The popular distrust of specializing is sure to grow less as our people become familiar with its effects and see how often narrow and thorough study, undertaken in early life, leads to ultimate breadth. It is a pretty dream that a man may start broad and then concentrate, but nine out of every ten strong men have taken the opposite course. They have begun in some one-sided way, and have added other sides as occasion required. Almost in his teens Shakespeare makes a specialty of the theatre, Napoleon of military science, Beethoven of music, Hunter of medicine, Faraday of chemistry, Hamilton of political science. The great body of painters, musicians, poets, novelists, theologians, politicians, are early specialists. In fact, self-made men are generally specialists. Something has aroused an interest, and they have followed it out until they have surveyed a wide horizon from a single point of view. In offering wider opportunities for specialization, colleges have merely been assimilating their own modes of training to those which prevail in the world at large.
It does not, therefore, seem to me objectionable that group systems set a high value on specialization. That is what every man does, and every clear-eyed college must do it too. What I object to is that group systems, so far as they adhere to their aim, enforce specialization. Among every half-dozen students, probably one will be injured if he cannot specialize largely; two or three more might wisely specialize in lower degree; but to force the remaining two or three into curricula shaped by professional bias is to do them serious damage. There are sober boys of little intrepidity or positive taste, boys who properly enough wish to know what others know. They will not make scholars. They were not born to enlarge the boundaries of knowledge. They have another function: they preserve and distribute such knowledge as already exists. Many of them are persons of wealth. To furnish them glimpses of varied learning is to save them from barbarism. Still another large class is composed of boys who develop late. They are boys who will one day acquire an interest of their own, if they are allowed to roam about somewhat aimlessly in the domain of wisdom until they are twenty-one. Both of these classes have their rights. The prescribed system was built to support them; the elective shelters and improves them; but a group system shuts them all out, if they will not on leaving school adopt professional courses. Whenever 238 I can hear of a group system which like the old college has a place for the indistinct young man, and like the new elective college matures him annually by suggesting that he take part in shaping his own career, I will accept the group system. Then, too, the public will probably accept it. Until then, rigid groups will be thought by many to lay too great a strain on unseasoned powers of choice, to present too many practical difficulties of construction, and to show too doctrinaire a confidence that every youth will fit without pinching into a specialized class.