The misconception is this: that what Germany accomplished in the eighteenth century we cannot accomplish in the nineteenth, because circumstances are so very different, chiefly because Germany is an old country and we are a young country. The circumstances are not so very different, and the difference, however great it may be estimated, is in our favor. We are a union of thirty or forty States: in the Germany of the eighteenth century there were three hundred. Ever since the adoption of our Federal Constitution we have enjoyed common rights of citizenship, common laws of commerce, common legal protection. Will it be necessary to remind the student of history that the Germans have acquired these blessings only within our own day? We are a nation of forty millions, rich and prosperous, free to develop our resources. The Germany of 1775 could count barely twenty millions, its soil was poorly tilled, its mineral wealth undeveloped, manufactures in an embryonic state, trade fettered in a thousand ways, the peasantry brutally ignorant and servile, the national character—to all appearance—ruined by cruel religious wars, the sense of national unity blunted by the recollections of a hundred petty feuds reaching back to the gloom of the Middle Ages, the national taste dominated by poor French models to an extent that now seems incredible, learning either dry pedantry or shallow cox-combry. We are indeed a young country, but we are young in hope; Germany was old, but it was old in weakness, in poverty, in despondency. Whoever doubts our ability to do as much as Germany did one hundred years ago, fails to profit by the teachings of history—overlooks the fact that Germany in 1840 was only where she had been in 1618. That we should take Germany for our standard of comparison, rather than England or France, is a postulate which has one circumstance unmistakably in its favor. Although we are connected with England by common descent, institutions and language, although the politics and philosophy of France have exerted considerable influence over our own, we do not observe our young men going in numbers to England and France to receive their final training. Their instinct leads them to Germany. For one American graduate of Oxford or Cambridge or of the French écoles, it would be easy to count ten doctors of Göttingen or Heidelberg. Our young men are not attracted to the German universities by such factitious considerations as cheapness of living or the acquisition of the language, but by sympathy with German methods and academic liberty.
Some of the most important fixed principles have been already touched upon, but only one can be developed in this place. It is, that if we are to establish a system of higher education, we must begin by recognizing freely and fully the distinction between teacher and professor. We must perceive the importance of having two sets of men—the one to teach, the other to investigate; the one engaged in training boys to learn, the other in showing young men how to think. When and how this distinction is to be established, in what special form it is to be embodied, is a secondary matter. The chief thing is to admit that it is essential and feasible. The young man who returns after a three years' absence in Germany, exhibiting with dignified pride his well-earned doctor's diploma, looks of course upon the institution that conferred it as the ne plus ultra. But riper experience, contact with the sharp corners of American prejudices and peculiarities, renewed familiarity with our social, political, commercial and literary life, will gradually convince him that a German university is not a thing to be plucked up by the roots and transplanted bodily to American soil. We have rather to take our native stock as we find it, and engraft upon it a slip from the German. One trial may fail, another may succeed. Our first efforts will be like those of a man groping about in the dark. More than one department in a German university will be of little avail in an American, and conversely we shall have to create some that do not exist elsewhere. For instance, in view of the great power exerted by the newspaper press, it might be desirable to have a course of study for those who think of taking up journalism as a profession. In such a course, political economy, constitutional and international law, English and American history, and the modern languages and literatures should constitute a full and serious discipline. It is not probable that the study of philology will ever attract the same attention here that it does abroad. Our needs lie in the direction of the natural sciences rather than in the direction of history and linguistics. But we should be derelict to our duty were we to sacrifice these sciences of the spirit, as the Germans call them, to the sciences of Nature. A culture without them would be the bleakest and most repulsive materialism.
The practical recognition of the difference between teacher and professor would be a decided step. By the side of it those which we have already taken would appear insignificant. The addition of chemistry, geology, or physiology to the previous curriculum does not change its character, so long as the professors of those branches instruct after the fashion of the professors of Latin and Greek. The advantage that the men of natural science have over their colleagues is one which the nature of the subject brings with it. In order to teach at all, they must come in close personal contact with their pupils, and to escape falling behind in their department, where new theories succeed one another with such rapid bounds, they must continue a certain amount at least of original research. Supplementing the present curriculum by post-graduate courses will hardly suffice. Such courses are open to serious objections. If conducted by the regular professors, they impose additional burdens upon men who have already more than enough. If conducted by special professors, they will tend to raise those professors at the expense of the regular faculty. A lecturer to graduates must necessarily appear, in the eyes of the undergraduate, superior to the man who hears recitations and prepares term-reports. Besides, young men who have passed four years at one college need "a change of air:" they will develop more rapidly if brought into contact with new ideas and new instructors. Every institution has an atmosphere of its own, which ceases after a time to act upon the student as a stimulant.
There is one additional point that should not be overlooked. A careful discrimination between the functions of the professor and those of the teacher would benefit both classes of men. Such has been the effect in Germany. The gymnasium-teacher has a high sense of the dignity of his vocation and a keen sense of its responsibilities, because he perceives that he must bring his labors to a well-rounded conclusion. He knows that the university does not supplement the gymnasium—that the university professors do not undertake to make good his shortcomings. The gymnasial course is a completed phase of training. It aims at giving the pupil all the general knowledge that he requires previous to his professional studies. What is lost or overlooked in the gymnasium cannot be acquired at the university. Hence the peculiar conscientiousness of the German teacher, his almost painful anxiety to make sure that his pupils master every subject, his unwillingness to let them go before they are "ripe." With us the change from school to college is not an abrupt transition, like that from gymnasium to university. The college course, certainly during the two lower years at least, is a continuation of the school course: the same or similar subjects are taught, and taught in the same way. Hence the school-teacher is tempted to regulate his efforts according to the college standard of admission. If he can only "get his men into college," as the saying is, he thinks that he is doing enough. To say this of all schools and all teachers would be flagrant injustice. Not a few of our older schools compare favorably with the best German gymnasiums, and in the large cities we find schools of even recent origin that endeavor faithfully to give a well-rounded discipline. But it remains nevertheless true that our schools, taken as a whole, give no more than the colleges require, and that only too many of them give less, trusting to the colleges to be lenient and eke out the deficiency. Moreover, when we read in the daily papers advertisements like the following, "Mr. Smith, a graduate of Harvard (or Yale or some other college, as the case may be), prepares young men for college," what inference are we to draw? Simply, that Mr. Smith, having gone through Harvard or Yale, knows exactly what is required there, and will undertake to "coach" any young man for admission in two or three years. Such coaching, if the young man is dull or backward, will consist in cramming him with required studies, to the neglect of everything not required. Teaching is not easy work. In many respects it is more difficult to be a good teacher than to be an original investigator. Whatever operates to strengthen and elevate the teacher's position, therefore, must be a gain. The highest incentive would be the consciousness that his school is not a mere stepping-stone to another school of larger growth, but the place where he must in truth prepare the youthful mind for independent study.
JAMES MORGAN HART.
CONTRASTED MOODS.
WANT.
Where is the power I fancied mine?
Can I have emptied my soul of thought?
In yesterday's fullness lay no sign