“That a committee be appointed by this Council to select a dozen universities and colleges and a dozen high and preparatory schools, to be represented in a convention to consider the problems of secondary and higher education.”
In accordance with the recommendation, the committee making the report, of which the writer was chairman, was authorized to call a meeting of representatives of leading educational institutions, at Saratoga in 1892. Invitations were issued and some thirty delegates responded. After a three days’ session a plan was formulated, which was adopted by the National Council. The Committee of Ten, thus appointed and charged with the duty of conducting an investigation of secondary-school studies, held its first meeting in New York City in November, 1892, with President Eliot of Harvard University as chairman. The committee arranged for nine subcommittees or conferences, each to consider a principal subject of high-school courses, and submitted to them definite inquiries. Each conference was composed of prominent instructors in the particular subject assigned. The inquiries covered such points as place of beginning the study, time to be given, selection of topics, advisability of difference in treatment for pupils going to college and for those who finish with the high school, methods, etc. The reports of these conferences in printed form, together with a summary of the recommendations, were in the hands of the Committee of Ten at their second meeting in New York, November, 1893. The report of the Committee of Ten, including the conference reports, through the good offices of the Commissioner of Education, was published by the Government.
As a member of the Committee of Ten, the author was invited to review the Report before the Council of Education, at a meeting held in Asbury Park, July, 1894.
EDUCATIONAL VALUES.
We estimate a man’s worth by his intellectual grasp, his æsthetic and ethical insight, and his power for action toward right and useful ends. If these characteristics make the ideal man, they should be the ideal aim of education, and a study is to be valued as it best contributes toward developing them. The same test of efficiency is to be applied to the whole curriculum of a school period.
There is a correlation between the field of knowledge and the knowing being. The objective world, with its varied content, answers to the mind with its varied powers. It is through the objective world of nature and of man that the subject comes to a consciousness of himself. Each important phase of the objective world makes a distinct contribution in extent or kind of knowledge to that consciousness. We do not live in a world where cucumbers grow on trees, or where human beings fail in their ever-recurring characteristics; and we believe it possible to discover the kind of value which each source of knowledge may furnish toward the education of the child, with the expectation that we shall not find the choice of studies to be a matter of indifference.
Without laying claim to a best analysis, we may use a customary division of the field of knowledge: (1) mathematical relations, (2) natural phenomena, (3) human action, (4) human thought, (5) æsthetic and ethical qualities. The studies corresponding are (1) mathematics, (2) natural science, (3) history, (4) language and literature, (5) art and ethics. Mathematics treats of quantitative knowledge, furnishes a peculiar intellectual training, and makes possible all commerce, all great structures, and the higher developments of physical science. Natural science acquaints us with the field of physical phenomena and of plant and animal life, is the best training in induction, and is largely the basis of our material civilization. History reveals the individual and our present civilization in the light of all human action, is a source of ethical training, and has high practical value for the problems of government and society. Literature reveals the ideal thought and the speculations of men, gives æsthetic and ethical culture, and in a practical way applies poetry to life. Art and ethics deal with distinct types of knowledge, cultivate the higher emotional powers, and, like ideal literature, set up standards of perfection in execution and in conduct of life.
The world in which we live is the world we are to know in order to adapt ourselves to it in thought, the world we are to know in order to gain power to work therein with success, the world we are to know as representing the thought of the Creator and the correlated nature of man, the world we are to know to gain the soul’s highest realization, and, for these ends, to know in its various phases. Each department of study makes its own peculiar contribution to knowledge, each has its peculiar fitness for developing some given power of the mind, each makes its own contribution in preparing the individual for the practical world. In three distinct ways does each subject have a peculiar value—for knowledge, for power, for practical life.
While a classification of studies without cross divisions is impossible, we may say that the first four groups give us the power of knowledge for action; the fifth, the feeling for perfection of action and rightness of action; and these, in their exercise and their tendency, create the right kind of power in action.