Page:Essays on the Higher Education.djvu/34

 Yale junior in this respect. However, we are rapidly approaching the time when we may make the secondary and relatively compulsory education end earlier than it now does—unless, alas! we lose our fast-ripening fruit by plucking it prematurely.

Into the question of the means by which to secure and guide the pupils' choice, I shall not attempt to enter. To permit the student who is really in the secondary stage of education to make up from term to term, or year to year, whatever potpourri he will of elective courses, is perhaps of all methods least likely to prove satisfactory. It should also be noticed that the effort to secure the right kind and amount of work in the secondary stage of education solely or chiefly by insisting upon "pass" examinations results in making "crammed" men instead of "formed" men. Perverse studet qui examinibus studet, Wolf used to declare. "The country of examinations," says M. Laboulaye, speaking of Austria, "is precisely that in which they do not work hard." But the remedy does not consist in abolishing all examinations, but rather in stimulating thorough teaching and in requiring from the pupil the preparation of daily and organically ordered tasks.

The question as to the amount and kind of knowledges and disciplines which are necessary to a "liberal education" is, both in theory and in