Page:Essays on the Higher Education.djvu/76

 The case of those more private enterprises which have hitherto furnished some of the best candidates for admission to our colleges requires even less of detailed consideration. This class of fitting-schools simply cannot comply with the conditions required by the full and consistent development of the "new education." The demand for instruction in German or French staggers a school of this kind; the demand for a curriculum including various percentages of physics, chemistry, more advanced mathematics, etc., would destroy it.

In general it is pretty obvious that the evolution of the new education, if it goes on in the directions in which its present indications are pointing, will bring upon the fitting-schools of the country such a severe application of the laws of natural selection that only a few of the fittest to survive will really succeed in surviving. At the same time, if they all survived, and were ultimately found reorganized in a form best to exhibit the type followed by this process, the result would, in my judgment, be far from satisfactory. For the true principle of the secondary education does not call for the offer of a great variety of studies, either prescribed or elective, but for a thorough and long-continued discipline in a very few judiciously selected and representative studies.

The relief which the fitting-schools require, in order to attain their true place in the system of