will it prove possible, as a famous university president has told us, to derive the training and experience which make for liberal education; and it is futile to expect that all liberally educated men shall exhibit powers of appreciation in the same fields. Life is short, and the world of ideals, knowledge, and specialized service grows constantly larger. If all men read, we are under obligation to seek to produce better standards of reading; but this does not mean that we shall bar from the ranks of the liberally educated, on this account alone, the man who has no Latin; nor he who, perchance, may not have read Browning; nor even one who frankly confesses a general distaste for classical literature.

Perhaps, in the more democratic society of the future, we shall find more satisfactory universal tests of liberal education in those regions of activity where large numbers have social contact. To-day we all buy and use pictures in newspaper, magazine, moving-picture show, billboard exhibition, and, less commonly, in art gallery and in the household; how much of liberal education for this purpose can a more purposive system of school training give us? We are all users of the output of the modern loom; according to the character of the demand, this output may be prevailingly flimsy, inartistic, unhygienic, and the product of shop conditions that promote poverty, ill health, and low morals. Will not right ideas of liberal education insist on elevating these conditions and socializing this form of consumption? Again, that field of social activity which we term politics has evolved a form of specialized service for which compensation is given as in other fields. Voting means simply collective employment of this specialized service toward the performance of particular functions. In a democracy, it has seemed desirable to allow large numbers to share, directly or indirectly, in the employment of public servants. The essence of general

civic education is to produce good employers of civic workers, that is, persons who will have a fairly clear conception of the task to be done, and who will know how to choose efficient and honest employees. From this standpoint, shall we continue to be able to call a man liberally educated for the conditions of modern life who manifests incapacity and professes indifference in exercising his social responsibility in the joint purchase of expert political service?

Now, if the conception of liberal education here put forth is valid, it is necessary that we realize how far the methods of modern academic training are alien to it. Not so much, perhaps, is this true in professed purpose as in methods and results. A careful examination of the pedagogic practice - largely traditional and customary, of course, rather than consciously purposive — of the secondary school and college of liberal arts will show the persistence of methods derived rather from an ancient vocational education, and ill serving the purposes of liberal learning.

At bottom, it would seem that popular objection to so-called liberal education rests largely on a widespread, though seldom articulate, conviction that it is not liberalizing. Does the study of the historic humanities, as carried on in a modern atmosphere, produce the "humane man the man who, as in the olden view, saw profoundly, thought deeply, sympathized widely, and became a blessed source of high ideals, correct thinking, and benign sentiment? Are our high-school graduates liberally educated to utilize and thereby to improve service in the making of books, the preaching of sermons, the nurture of children, the policing of cities, the administration of charity, and the presentation of plays? Is the organized training of the average college of liberal arts not the college life, since often, by chance or design, this is unques

tionably liberalizing such as to produce high-grade appreciation and effective powers of utilization in the fields of citizenship, art, social intercourse, religion?

It seems highly probable that, because of the prevailing haziness of thinking regarding the valid and practicable ends of liberal education, there is ineffective organization of means. What, for example, has the obligatory study of algebra and geometry on the part of ninety-five per cent of the more than half million high-school girls in America to do with their liberal education? Some seventy per cent, probably, of all boys and girls in our public high schools are constantly studying Latin, that ancient and extolled instrument of liberal education; but, as commonly studied, by grammatical methods and without persistent interest, what part does it play, except in rare instances, in the liberal education of American youth? These subjects, it will be said, are prescribed merely as the preliminary instruments of a later liberal education; but what is this? Are the instruments ever actually used, and with what effect? Does such education, in truth, function? Where, and to what extent?

Again, the large purposes of science teaching, enunciated at intervals since the days of Spencer and Huxley, are acceptable and admirable from the standpoint of liberal education; but in spite of laboratories and innumerable courses in college and secondary school, do not these purposes still remain largely unrealized? What, after all, for the average youth, has the prevailing study of physics, of chemistry, and of biology to do with liberal education? The methods currently employed are those of formal vocational education; high school and college teachers organize their work as if their sole business were to prepare forthcoming specialists in teaching, medicine, and engineering. Once in a generation each institution may get a real teacher of science from the standpoint of inspiration, insight,

culture in a word, liberal education; but the rank and file are technicians only. The popular verdict is that science, pure or applied, is not yet in practice a feature of liberal education.

The same criticism applies to other subjects. Our secondary schools and colleges multiply courses in history. We all feel, vaguely, that in history, if anywhere, should be found valuable means of liberal education. But scientific methods, an insufficient pedagogy, and a prevailing lack of social insight - perhaps better called sociological insight have contributed to the sterilization of this subject as a soil for the growth of ideals, sentiments, and useful social knowledge.

III

Obviously we need a revision of the philosophy and methods of liberal education. Surely no one can contend that, in a world growing daily richer in all kinds of re- and spiritual, intellectual, æsthetic, material

sources

in specialized service, we do not need education toward wise utilization on a high social plane. The democratic and universal character of this education must be assured. Let it not be forgotten that extra-school agencies, and these often of an irresponsible sort, are always active in leading the consumer toward anything but the finer forms of utilization. The Sunday newspaper and the cheap magazine become the literature of the majority; the billboard, vaudeville, and moving-picture show give to the people not only romance, but art as well; the convivial association of the drinking-place is substituted for more refined and restrained intercourse; and advertising, which now costs annually far more than the total outlay for all forms of organized education, incessantly fashions tastes and standards in the use of clothing, ornament, food, and habitation, as well as in literature, music, and political service.

Many of the foregoing agencies are good; but they are seldom capable of producing from within themselves the higher standards, and they often fail to lend themselves to the wider social purposes needed by the age in which we live. The school is the one institution under more or less of public control which is charged, in so far as it deliberately ministers to liberal education, with responsibility for the elevation and diffusion of higher standards of appreciation and utilization. A purposive programme to this end is a present educational need. When it shall be evolved, it seems probable that, in comparison with it, our pitiful drills in algebra, Latin, textbook physics, ancient history, elementary logic, and English composition, will make a poor exhibition as supposed means of genuine liberal education.

How can such programme be formulated? It seems to the writer that the first condition is a statement of the aims of liberal education in terms of demonstrable utilities a statement which shall consist neither of mere descriptions of means and subjects of study, nor of vague and perhaps mystical generalizations. "Culture," "mental training," "æsthetic appreciation," "the scientific spirit," are all too uncertain, too complex, and perhaps in their general aspects too impracticable of realization, to serve usefully as formulated goals of educational effort; and on the other hand, subjects of study, the so-called liberal arts, as condensed, formalized, and desiccated by the schoolmaster, in textbook and manual, are rarely, in themselves, utilities, but merely instruments or means. It may be desirable that a high-school girl should be induced or compelled to study algebra, but surely this should not be for the sake of the algebra itself; and it is educational faith and dogma, not certitude and science, which now declare that out of such study she will emerge keener of mind, stronger in self-control, or elevated in