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.