Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/278

266 Dictionaries, grammars, literary models abound, and experienced teachers superabound. And yet, with all these facilities, the study of dead languages has been the one pre-eminent and historic failure of the so-called liberal education. There is more repulsiveness in it and more hatred of it than any other kind of study mathematics not excepted. There have been more flogging, bullying, and bribery resorted to as incentives to classical study than to all other studies whatever. Both in England and in Germany the system has long maintained an exclusive ascendency by a barbaric discipline on the one hand, and on the other by all kinds of prizes, honors, and emoluments that could stimulate selfish ambition, and which have been jealously withheld from modern studies. With all these factitious stimulants to classical study, its failure has been so notorious that we can not attribute it to any accidental defects in the modes of its teaching. Nor can these defects be so readily repaired, for no possible reform in the modes of studying the dead languages can alter their relations to modern thought. It is here that we find the open secret of their failure.

Professor Cooke struck the keynote of this discussion when he remarked, in his article on "The Greek Question," in the last "Monthly": "A half-century has wholly changed the relations of human knowledge," and "the natural sciences have become the chief factors of our modern civilization." This change in the relations of knowledge, by which the sciences have become the great intellectual factors of civilization, has necessarily brought with it a corresponding revolution in education. For the new knowledge did not originate by the old methods of study; it came by new exercises of the mind, as much contrasted with previous habits as the greatness of its results is contrasted with the barrenness of the traditional scholarship. The old method occupied itself mainly with the study of language; the new method passed beyond language to the study of the actual phenomena of nature. The old method has for its end lingual accomplishments; the new method, a real knowledge of the characters and relations of natural things. The old method trains the verbal memory, and the reason, so far as it is exercised in transposing thought from one form of expression to another. The new method cultivates the powers of observation and the faculty of reasoning upon the objects of experience so as to educate the judgment in dealing with the problems of life. The old method left uncultivated whole tracts of the mind that are of supreme importance in gaining a knowledge of the actual properties and principles of things which are fundamental in our progressive civilization; the new method begins with the systematic cultivation of these neglected mental powers. The old method has yielded to the world long ago all that it is capable of giving; the new method has already accomplished much, but it has as yet yielded but comparatively little of what it is capable of giving when it becomes organized into a perfected system of education. It is this new scientific method, based in nature, fortified in the noblest conquests of the human mind, and full of promise in its future development that has become the rival in these days of the old system of dead-language studies. They have failed because they can not hold their ground against the new competitor.

The classics are constantly defended because of their boasted discipline, yet they have declined because of the growing sense of the weakness and inferiority of the mental cultivation they impart. They are accomplishments for show, rather than solid acquisitions for use. The study of words, the chief scholarly occupation, is mentally debilitating, because it leaves unexercised, or exercises but very imperfectly, the most