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OUTLINES FROM THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION.
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should agree upon such prescribed studies as above set down; for all undergraduate students, will not find ready credence. The movement at Harvard which is now phrased as the new education, though an extreme, is perfectly natural, and easily lends itself to such brilliant advocacy as that of Professor Palmer: "The old conception had been that there were certain matters, a knowledge of which constituted a liberal education. Compared with the possession of these, the temper of the receiving mind was a secondary affair. Under the new conditions college faculties were forced to recognize personal aptitudes. In assessing the worth of studies, attention was thus withdrawn from their subject-matter, and transferred to the response they called forth in the apprehender. Hence arose a new ideal of education in which temper of mind had pre-eminence over quœsita, the guidance of the powers of knowing over the store of matters known." Nothing could well be found more admirable than the reply of Professor Howison to this paragraph. So far as a recognition of the needs of human nature is concerned, he seems to meet the case completely: "Study can not be liberalizing unless it is pursued in a temper of freely dutiful diligence, but no more can it be so if it does not put its subject in possession of the constitutive fibers of civilization [italics present writer's]. Our life in humanism is linked by vital threads to the growth of the past as well as to the environment of the present—threads that can not be severed except on penalty of spiritual death." We inquire how shall the student be put in possession of the "constitutive fibers in the historic substance of civilization"? In reply. Professor Howison gives his curriculum for all undergraduate study:

"Languages, classical and modern; mathematics, in all its general conceptions, thoroughly apprehended; physics, acquired in a similar manner, and the other natural sciences, though with much less of detail; history and politics; literature, especially of the mother-tongue, but indispensably the masterpieces in other languages, particularly the classic; philosophy, in the thorough elements of psychology, logic, metaphysics, and ethics, each historically treated, and economics, in the history of elementary principles, must all enter into any education that can claim to be liberal."

This is, indeed, a "liberal" course of study, but no amount of argument could persuade a large number of our educators, or of our average citizens, to insist upon such a course for each student. If here alone be a liberal education, many would say, so much the worse for a liberal education; we will have none of it. To compel a boy, who has absolutely no natural disposition for it, to spend his years in groans over mathematics or classics, or psychology, logic, metaphysics, and ethics, would be a matter calling for action from the Society for Prevention of Cruelty. And yet the writer is in direct sympathy with the position of Professor Howison. The writer believes that these are