Page:Essays on the Higher Education.djvu/91



are few things more astonishing than the rapidity and apparent ease with which periods of conservative thinking and practice are sometimes followed by great and even radical changes. Opinions which have long been regarded as having the necessary quality of rational principles are at such times contested and discarded; practices that have come to be associated with sacred ideas of duty and of religion are deemed unreasonable and are abandoned. Indeed, in this generation and land of ours, such great and radical changes have become so frequent as almost to fail of exciting the astonishment they really merit. Moreover, there are few subjects—at least among those concerning which the world has commonly been supposed to have settled conclusions on the basis of a sufficient experience—that are just now ina more precarious condition than that of education. For tens of centuries the so-called civilized world has discussed and practised touching the question how best to train the young. For a less number of centuries a considerable part of the civilized world has been much at its ease in the gratifying