Page:Education and Life; (IA educationlife00bakerich).pdf/83



We estimate a man's worth by his intellectual grasp, his æsthetic and ethical insight, and his power for action toward right and useful ends. If these characteristics make the ideal man, they should be the ideal aim of education, and a study is to be valued as it best contributes toward developing them. The same test of efficiency is to be applied to the whole curriculum of a school period.

There is a correlation between the field of knowledge and the knowing being. The objective world, with its varied content, answers to the mind with its varied powers. It is through the objective world of nature and of man that the subject comes to a consciousness of himself. Each important phase of the objective world makes a distinct contribution in extent or kind of knowledge to that consciousness. We do not live in a world where cucumbers grow on trees, or where human beings fail in their ever-recurring characteristics; and we believe it possible to discover the kind of value which each source of knowledge may furnish toward the education of the child, with the expectation that we shall not find the choice of studies to be a matter of indifference.

Without laying claim to a best analysis, we may use a customary division of the field of knowledge: (1) mathematical relations, (2) natural phenomena,