vard College were Latin, Greek, elementary mathematics, and the barest elements of ancient geography and history; and to those requirements the courses in good secondary schools were accommodated; for the requirements of other American colleges differed from those of Harvard College only in measure or degree and not in substance. To-day the subjects accepted for admission to the freshman class of Harvard College embrace English, elementary Greek, Latin, German, French, or Spanish, advanced German, advanced French, ancient history, medieval and modern history, English history, American history and civil government, elementary algebra and plane geometry, physics, chemistry, geography, botany and zoology, advanced Greek, advanced Latin, advanced history, advanced algebra, solid geometry, logarithms and trigonometry, freehand drawing, mechanical drawing. From this long list of subjects the candidate for admission has a wide range of choice, although certain groupings are prescribed. Nevertheless, Harvard College still requires of every candidate for admission that he shall have studied elementary Latin three years in his secondary school four or five hours a week - a condition of admission which thirty-six considerable American universities, including Columbia University, no longer prescribe. All the other leading American universities have adopted to a greater or less extent the new subjects for admission which Harvard has adopted, and only four out of seventy-six leading American universities and colleges retain conditions of admission at all resembling those of Harvard College in the year 1850.

No one can reasonably maintain that the American educated generation of to-day is less well equipped for its life work than the generation which graduated from the American colleges in 1850. On the contrary, all the old professions maintain a much higher standard for admission

and in practice than they maintained in 1850, and a large group of new professions has been added to the old. Moreover, business, including agriculture, manufacturing, trading, and distributing, has become to a much greater extent than formerly an intellectual calling, demanding good powers of observation, concentration, and judgment. There was a time when the principal part of the work of universities was training scholarly young men for the service of the Church, the Bar, and the State; and all such young men needed, or were believed to need, an intimate knowledge of Greek and Latin; but now, and for more than a hundred years, universities are called on to train young men for public service in new democracies, for a new medical profession, and for finance, journalism, transportation, manufacturing, the new architecture, the building of vessels and railroads, and the direction of great public works which improve agriculture, conserve the national resources, provide pure water-supplies, and distribute light, heat, and mechanical power. The practitioners of these new professions can profit in so many directions by other studies in youth that they ought not all indiscriminately to be obliged to study Latin.

The new education since the Civil War has met the rising demands of the times in some measure; but the newer education must go forward more rapidly on the same lines. The rising generations will not prove inferior to the older. With better and more varied training, their educated leaders will rise to ever higher levels of bodily vigor, mental capacity, and moral character.

THE ASSAULT ON HUMANISM. I

PAUL SHOREY

I

Nor to us first have the things of beauty seemed fair, the sore-tried humanist murmurs after Theocritus. But Tennyson's adaptation is more pertinent to the present purpose:

Not only we, the latest seed of time,
New men that in the flying of a wheel
Cry down the past

not only we blaspheme the divinity that we lack eyes to discern.

Es wird nichts so schön gemacht

Es kommt einer der's veracht!

There were brave men living before Agamemnon, and educational reformers who had the courage of their insensibilities before Mr. Flexner. He stands in the momentary limelight, the transient American embodiment of a recurrent type, exhibiting as the first pledges of a new science of education the iconoclasms of Tom Paine's Age of Reason, and the arguments against Latin of the chapter on Education in the fourth Discourse of Helvetius's De l'Esprit.

Education — what it is, in contrast to what it might

be has always seemed to impatient revolutionaries a no less unsatisfactory and bungling makeshift than marriage, government, the distribution of property, or life itself. And the emphasis of his irresponsible denunciation has often convinced naïve disciples that the protestant

is divinely commissioned to administer a new school system for the creation of a new heaven and a new earth.

An excellent subject for a monograph of the pedagogical seminar would be a comparative historical study of the psychology of the projectors and enthusiasts, the expositors of Great Didactics, and exploiters of Gertrudes teaching their children, and institutors of Senhusian schools who have proclaimed this gospel of educational "reformation without tarrying for any."

A specialist in the psychology of advertising would be needed to appreciate the unconscious policy that attracts attention by paradoxes and exaggerations which are compromised and attenuated in practice when the object has been attained. The philosopher of history would then remind the disdainful humanist that these crudities are inseparable from the wasteful process of human evolution, and that the final outcome of agitation is sometimes a good unforeseen by the agitator. And the conclusion of the whole matter would be that sage return of Plato upon himself: "Ah, dear Glaucon, do not affirm that the curriculum which we have prescribed for our guardians is the best possible education. But only that they must have the best, whatever it is, if they are to have the chief thing needful."

To return to Mr. Flexner- the bookish student of recent modernist manifestoes experiences that odd sense of "been there before," so entertainingly discussed by the Autocrat and attributed by the new psychology to some weakness or defect of "stoic tension" in the brain. "If this lad comes to my school," says the Platonic sophist in effect, "I will not afflict the spirit of youth in him and corrupt his intelligence with useless studies as other educators do, but teach him the art of life and how to rule his house and the city."-"For this reason," said the Arbiter of Elegancies, Petronius, "do our boys become so stupid

in the schools, because they learn nothing that pertains to real life." "There's Aristotle," cries Sir John Daw in The Silent Woman, "a mere commonplace fellow; Plato a discourser; Thucydides and Livy, tedious and dry." "What do you think of the poets, Sir John?" inquires Clerimont. "Not worthy to be named for authors. Homer, an old tedious prolix ass, talks of curriers and chines of beef; Vergil, of dunging of land and bees; Horace, of I know not what." "I think so," is Clerimont's comment.

Campanella's City of the Sun anticipates, so far as the undeveloped science of his day allowed, moving-picture education and the California millionaire who proposes to teach real geography on a playground-landscape-garden map of the world on Mercator's Projection, costing what only a millionaire could afford. All studies and sciences are painted on the circuit walls of Campanella's Utopia in an admirable manner. The boys move, not the pictures. "Before the third year the boys learn the language and the alphabet on the wall by walking around them. There are magistrates who announce the meaning of the pictures, and boys are accustomed to learn all the sciences without toil and as if for pleasure. . . until they are ten years old."

It would please President Eliot to hear that "in order to find out the bent of the genius of each one, after the seventh year they take them to the readings of all the sciences. There are four lectures and in the course of four hours the four in their order explain everything." The result, as was to be expected, is that "the sciences are taught with a facility . . . by which more scholars are turned out by us in one year than by you in ten or fifteen years." This is because "not too much care is given to the cultivation of languages. .. for such knowledge requires much servile labor and memory work,