Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/711

 have been made smooth, and everything invites the unwilling to learn. The results of many years' unintermittent labor are presented in a compressed form in every description of hand-book and pocket primer, for it is only permitted to a comparatively few to remain ignorant and be content therewith. The field of knowledge has thus been greatly extended and opened out, and a great diversity of subjects have been grappled with, in one way or another; and, in spite of the fact that much of this great movement produces a paltry caricature of learning, new interests have been excited and minds stimulated which would have lain stagnant before. The managers of the various seats of education have roused themselves to supply the needs of the time and extend their resources; and they now present to the public a programme far broader and more inviting than that of a quarter of a century ago. In this way various special lines of education have been more widely adopted, and their adoption has influenced the purely general education, with this result: Men now perceive that boys' minds are almost infinitely various, and that knowledge of various sorts must be presented to them in various ways—anything to awaken interest and encourage voluntary intellectual effort. Now, it is from the development of this theory that I think we may expect results having an important bearing on the matter in hand. The introduction of subjects likely to attract boys' interest and the general idea of teaching them by exciting that interest tend to upset the notion that work is valuable per se quite independently of the subjects worked at. It must be admitted that this notion has been allowed every chance. Men have aimed at educing solid effort by a curriculum of study which could only be attractive to a select few. Let us hope that the idea has really had its day, for, besides being, as many now think, comparatively useless in itself, its effect on an overgrown athleticism is positively pernicious. So long as the graver occupations of a boy's life are slavish and detested, he will throw himself heart and soul into any kind of amusement, and set himself to find his only happiness therein, while all knowledge, all that is either useful for practical life, or merely refining in itself, he will vaguely think must be in a way dismal; his view of it will be colored by the memory of the toilsome and sterile hours he has spent with his books. And, even if he is forced to learn something, such knowledge as he gains will be unproductive; he has no affection for it, and does not care to impart it. It is remarkable how many men seem half ashamed even of such useful knowledge as they do possess. If boys' minds are to be elevated from athletics to anything higher, it will not be by such methods as these."

The change of method which Mr. Littleton regards as hopeful consists, first, in modernizing the curriculum of studies, and introducing into it subjects less repulsive than those now in vogue, and which are capable of exciting a readier and stronger intellectual