Learned men who do not approve this plan are offered a choice from many others: six-week courses in law, medicine, and theology; summer schools for the promotion of science and the liberal arts; questions and answers in the educational column of some journal for the home; or a national university so universal that it shall supply lunches and learning for all out of the public chest, with no doorkeeper to examine passports.
The way to extend the university in this direction is so well understood that I will turn now to another part of our subject, for some may be less familiar with our opportunity to construct a royal road to learning for those who are entitled to use it.
A recent writer on education, who says American universities impose "upon young men in the nineteenth century a curriculum devised by dead-and-gone priests for the young men of the twelfth," calls upon the teachers of America to reconstruct their curriculum on psychological principles. I myself am no psychologist, and while I fail to see how this fact concerns the public, it has recently been pointed out in print, although no one has ever charged me with lack of reverence for the psychologist. In truth, he is to me what the good old family doctor is to many, for I am convinced that it would be hard to name one among all the educational ills that flesh is heir to that he would not be able to throw on the spot, with a good collar-and-elbow hold. I have a prodigious respect for those fine big words curriculum and psychological principles, and I welcome the plan for reconstructing the curriculum on psychological principles the more eagerly because it is extremely simple and not hard to understand, like some psychological utterances. In fact, it is so very simple and easy that it is sure of enthusiastic indorsement by innumerable children, for this reformer's plan is neither more nor less than the abolition of the pedagogue.
"If," he says, "I was director general of education for all America" (which at the present moment he is not), "I would abolish colleges, but send American youths to travel for two years in Europe. In my opinion," he says, "a father who has sons and daughters of a proper age to go to college will do better by his children if he sends them for two years to travel in Europe than if he sends them for three years to an American or English university."
Admirable and simple as is this plan for ascending Parnassus in vestibuled trains of drawing-room cars, personally conducted by Grant Allen, this psychologist seems to me to err in thinking it new, for it was in high favor in England during the reign of that merry monarch who was always so furious at the sight of books that his queen, who loved reading, had to practice it in secret in her closet.
Euphranor having asked, in the reign of George II, "Who are these learned men that of late years have demolished the whole fabric which lawgivers, philosophers, and divines have been erecting for so many ages? Lysicles, hearing these words, smiled and said he believed Euphranor had figured to himself philosophers in square caps and long gowns; but, thanks to these happy times, the reign of pedantry was over. Our philosophers, said he, are of a different kind from those awkward students. They are the best-bred men of the age, men of the world, men of pleasure, men of fashion, and fine gentlemen. I will undertake a lad of fourteen bred in the modern way shall make a better figure and be more considered in any drawing-room or assembly of polite people than one at four-and-twenty who hath lain by a long time at school and college. He will say better things in a better manner, and be more liked by good judges. I say, when a man observes and considers all this, he will be apt to ascribe it to the force of truth and the merits of our cause, which, had it been supported by the revenues and establishments of the Church and universities, you may guess what a figure it would make by the figure it makes without them. People begin to open their eyes. It is not impossible but the revenues that in ignorant times were applied to a wrong use may hereafter, in a more enlightened age, be applied to a better."
"The money that went to found the Leland Stanford or the Johns Hopkins University," says the modern reformer, "would have been immeasurably better spent in bringing St. Marks at Venice and the Uffizi at Florence into the lives of innumerable young Americans. Here, then, is the opportunity for a wiser Cornell."
A few years ago an acquaintance of my own, himself an accomplished psychologist, brought with him to Washington a young man, a native of north Greenland, that he might take into his life the best substitute for St. Marks at Venice that this country affords. While limited in range, the results were as definite as one could wish, for two of the most refined delights of our wonderful civilization—rum and horses—were at once taken into the life of Eskimo Joe with all the fresh enthusiasm of youth. In his boyish impetuosity he could not see why a hired horse should not have the fleetness of Santa Claus's reindeer and the endurance of wild dogs; and as few horses survived the first lesson, the psychologist soon reconstructed the curriculum, for Joe's progress in rum and oysters was most gratifying. You who have attended my lectures in anthropology will remember that Nature has bestowed on the Eskimos two endowments which are not elsewhere found united, although they are exhibited separately in high perfection by the anaconda and the camel. Joe was able to load himself with food and drink like a pirate ship victualed for a long cruise, and he became so proficient in three months that a two-year course seemed unnecessary, so he was shipped off to Labrador at the first opportunity, and was left there to carry St. Marks at Venice into the homes of Greenland as best he might. It is clear that our psychological reformer's plan is not new, but he says our curriculum is some thousand years behind the times, and he asks, "Will somebody one day have the wisdom to perceive that the education which sufficed for the mediæval England of the Plantagenets is not absolutely adapted to the America of the nineteenth century?" I myself know so little of the curriculum of that day that this charge may, for all I know, be well founded, and if so it were a grievous fault. For all I know the dead-and-gone priests of the twelfth century may have read Homer in the original Greek, and carried on their studies in trigonometry and navigation with the aid of logarithms and the nautical almanac, although it has come in my way to know something of their method of teaching zoölogy, for my studies have led me to examine a text-book on this subject, which was written early in the twelfth century for the education of the young Queen Adelaide, who was married to Henry I of England in 1121. The dedication is as follows:
"Philippi de Thann into the French language has translated the Bestiary, a book of science, for the honor of a jewel, who is a very handsome woman, Aliz is she named, a queen is she crowned, Queen she is of England, may her soul never have trouble! In Hebrew in truth Aliz means praise of God. I will compose a book, may God be with the commencement!"
As a sample of the zoölogical curriculum of the twelfth century take this chapter: