Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/391

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LIBERAL AND TECHNICAL EDUCATION
385

and beauty that actually is present in our work, and in counting individuality, patient and prudent independence, of more significance than the world's approval or reward. Subsidiary to such ideals the classics, ancient and modern, have indeed their place, which is side by side, however, with modern science, in all its branches, and the alert observation of living men and existent things, which are at least as important instruments to such liberalism.

The reformation which thus appears necessarly would be furthered, in my opinion, by the formation in each school and university of one or more associations of instructors for the professed, deliberate and persistent study of the means through which the liberal spirit and purpose may be preserved and increased, first in themselves, second in the world at large, and finally in the student body. For liberalism can not be very effective in the curriculum until it is born again in our hearts and in the world at large. Few instructors seem to be less liberal, in the fundamental significance of the term, than many teachers of the subjects which are traditionally styled liberal. Personally, I look with most hope towards those young men who are conscious of the need without being committed by tradition and profession to any particular way of meeting the need, men, who, having their eyes fixed upon the industrial world as the place where men really live, earnestly ask themselves how the boys who are to toil there may take with them from home and school the habitual recognition that the ultimate aim of all modern industry is nothing but the exaltation of manhood, the free realization in individuals of the ideals of manhood.