Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/419

Rh in practice, and then it is all over with any institution which becomes subject to their wild empiricism.

The saddest results of such proceedings are seen, of course, in the pupils. That a certain school should lose its pupils, or fall into debt, or be closed, is a comparatively small affair. The real mischief is that men should be produced who have no real education, but only a perverse training in putting forward plausible and meretricious appearances. Such education falls in with the outward phenomena of a sensational era and strengthens the impressions which a young and inexperienced observer gets from our modern society, that audacity is the chief of talents, that success or failure is the only measure of right or wrong, that the man to be admired is the one who invents clever tricks to circumvent a rival or opponent, or to skip over a troublesome principle. Young people are more acute in their observations, and they draw inferences and form generalizations more logically and consistently than their elders. They have not yet learned respect for dogmas, traditions, and conventionalities, and their "education" goes on silently but surely, developing a philosophy of life either of one kind or another. If, therefore, you have an educational system consisting of formal cram for recitation or examination, if there is a skimming of text-books, an empty acquisition of terms, a memorizing of results only, you may pursue high-sounding studies and "cover a great deal of ground," you may have an elaborate curriculum and boast of your proficiency in difficult branches, but you will have no education. You may produce men who can spend a lifetime dawdling over trifles, or men who always scatter their force when they try to think, but you will not have intelligent men with minds well-disciplined and well under control, who are able to apply their full force to any new exigency, or any new problem, and to grasp and conquer it.