What steps are taken to familiarize the students of, say the freshman class, with that great nature of which they form a part? What, for instance, do they learn of the structure of their own bodies, and of the means of preserving health? One lesson a week is given on Physiology and Hygiene, and that is all! The fear of making this letter too long compels me merely to refer the Committee to pages 40 to 42 of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s chapter on “What Knowledge is of Most Worth,” in his work on Education, in farther illustration of this subject, instead of making extracts from it as I would otherwise like to do.
Attention, it is true, is paid throughout the college course to mathematical studies, yet very little to their practical application; while to Chemistry, the parent of modern physics, the manual (which is our guide) prescribes two lessons per week to the introductory class, and to the freshman, sophomore, and junior classes absolutely none at all! Mining, Mechanical Engineering, Architecture, Theoretical Agriculture, Biology, and Botany are utterly ignored; and no branch of Zoology is even mentioned in the curriculum. We next come to a science more important, because universal in its application and in its need than any other, viz.: The Science of Human Well-being, commonly called Political or Social Economy. Here, too, like exclusion! except that in the sophomore class, for one term, one hour per week is given to it. That is to say, a people who are to live by labor are left by the guardians of their education in ignorance of the laws by which the reward for that labor must be regulated; they who are to administer capital are to be left to blind chance whether to act in accordance with those laws of nature which determine its increase, or ignorantly to violate them!
Restrained again from quotation by the fear of wearying the Committee, permit me to refer them to the lecture of Dr. Hodgson, delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, on “The Importance of the Study of Economic Science,” which will be found in the work of Professor Youmans, on “The Culture demanded by Modern Life.”
I confess to a feeling of deep discouragement at the perusal of such a record as that presented by the course of studies at the College of the City of New York, especially when I find that this is the state of things a large number of the Trustees seem desirous of perpetuating. My views on this subject are confirmed by the following remarks found in President Barnard’s Essay on “Early Mental Training, and the Studies best fitted for it.”
“Whatever may be the value of the study of the classics in a subjective point of view, nothing could possibly more thoroughly unfit a man for any immediate usefulness in this matter-of-fact world, or make him more completely a stranger in his own home, than the purely classical education which used recently to be given, and which, with some slight improvement, is believed to be still given by the universities of England. This proposition is very happily enforced by a British writer, whose strictures on the system appeared in the London Times some twelve or thirteen years ago.
“Common things are quite as much neglected and despised in the education of the rich as in that of the poor. It is wonderful how little a young gentleman may know when he has taken his university degrees, especially if he has been industrious, and has stuck to his studies. He may really spend a long time in looking for somebody more ignorant than himself. If he talks with the driver of the stage-coach that lands him at his father’s door, he finds he knows nothing of horses. If he falls into conversation with a gardener, he knows nothing of plants or flowers. If he walks into the fields, he does not know the difference between barley, rye, and wheat; between rape and turnips; between natural and artificial grass. If he goes into a carpenter’s yard, he does not know one wood from another. If he comes across an attorney, he has no idea of the difference between common and statute law, and is wholly in the dark as to those securities of personal and political liberty on which we pride ourselves. If he talks with a country magistrate, he finds his only idea of the office is that the gentleman is a sort of English Sheik, as the Mayor of the neighboring borough is a sort of Cadi. If he strolls into any workshop or place of manufacture, it is always to find his level, and that a level far below the present company. If he dines out, and as a youth of proved talents and perhaps university honors is expected to be literary, his literature is confined to a few popular novels—the novels of the last century, or even of the last generation—history and poetry having been almost studiously omitted in his education. The girl who has never stirred from home, and whose education has been economized, not to say neglected, in order to send her own brother to college, knows vastly more of those things than he does. The same exposure awaits him wherever he goes, and whenever he has the audacity to open his mouth. At sea he is a landlubber; in the country a cockney; in town a greenhorn; in science an ignoramus; in business a simpleton; in pleasure a milksop—everywhere out of his element, everywhere at sea, in the clouds, adrift, or by whatever word utter ignorance and incapacity are to be described. In society and in the work of life, he finds himself beaten by the youth whom at college he despised as frivolous or abhorred as profligate.”
Take the preparation of our youth for their duties as citizens. Here, again, a knowledge of political and social economy is indispensable. We have seen the attention it receives; and while two lessons a week for one hour, and that only to the senior class in its last term, are given to American citizens on the Constitution of the United States and on International Law, none whatever is given on the science of Government throughout the entire course of five years!
I might go through the whole course of studies with similar results. Here and there, in this or that class, a small amount of attention is given to some of the sciences omitted in the other classes; but the entire record is one of the most disheartening character.
Words! words! engross almost exclusively the attention of the students from the hour they enter the College until they leave it; and it is not to the five-and-twenty graduates the palm of useful industry should be awarded, but to the many who, in discouragement, abandon a course which tends to unfit them for the great battle of life!
What, then, are the reasons generally assigned for this perverse conventionalism of devoting the time of youth to the acquirement of dead words, to the unavoidable exclusion of nearly every thing that is of value? First, we are told that we can not understand the English language without a knowledge of Latin, from which it is derived. The inaccuracy of this pretension is at once made manifest by reference to Webster, where he states: