Page:Essays on the Higher Education.djvu/132

 Once more, let it be borne in mind that the very inquiry as to what a "modern" liberal education should be admits the propriety, and even the necessity, of making changes in many of the factors of such an education. And here J must insist upon a distinction which has been of late almost wholly overlooked in all discussions of this subject. This is the distinction between a truly modern education and the recent great extension of the elective system in the education offered by the higher institutions of this country. That kind of freedom, or "liberality" if you please, which gives to the youth under education the choice of his subjects of pursuit, and largely of the order and manner of their pursuit, has been carried among us to an extent which astonishes the European students of educational problems. But neither the exercise nor the withdrawal of this freedom in itself determines the question whether the student is receiving a genuinely modern education. What is necessarily implied in this word "modern" I shall try to make clear in another connection. I now wish only to say that the term signifies some kind of change which shall adapt the so-called liberal education to the age, but that the particular kind of change required is by no means necessarily to be reached through an elective system.

And now as I inquire, "What, then, are the