Page:Education and Life; (IA educationlife00bakerich).pdf/136

 enables him to estimate things at their relative value, to learn the place, use, and end of each.

That liberal education should remain the ideal of at least a large part of the college course, most educators agree. Were this function of the college not a distinctive and essential one, that department of learning would of necessity be abandoned, and the direct road to practical business would be pursued. Recent addresses, representing three of the greatest American universities, agree that the function of the college is to be maintained, and that acquaintance with the several fields of knowledge is necessary to the very idea of liberal education. They agree to include the field of the languages and literature, the field of the sciences and mathematics, the subjective field, that of philosophy and psychology. In a late report of the Commissioner of Education appears a German criticism of American education, which mentions the lack of linguistic training. The writer says: "The consequences are seen in the defective linguistic-logical discipline of the mind, which perhaps more than the discipline in the mathematical forms of thought is a requisite of all profound intellectual progress, be that in linguistic or in mathematical and scientific branches." In the University of Berlin, philosophy is a required subject for all degrees.

The conservation of the ideals of the race is largely the work of liberally educated men. Some one has argued that not through education, but through a higher standard of society and politics, will the youth of the land be reached; but society and politics depend upon ideal education and the church for their own purification.