Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/794

776 and the support of the most powerful social influence, it is difficult to understand on what the opposition to the free development of the "new education" is based. Are not gentlemen, who have been talking of a revolution in education, taking counsel of their fears rather than of their better judgment; and are they not forgetting that the teachers of natural science have the same interest in upholding the principles of sound education as have their classical colleagues? Certainly there can be no question that, in the future as in the past, they will ever seek to maintain the integrity of all the great departments of the university unimpaired. It has happened before this that the judgment, even of intelligent men, has been warped by their class relations or supposed interests; but as, in this country, the learned class has no control of government patronage, we may at least hope that the discussion of the Greek question will never assume with us the great bitterness that a similar controversy has aroused in Germany.

There has been a great deal said in this discussion about the "humanities," and it has been assumed that, while the analysis of the Greek verb is "humanizing," the analysis of the phenomena of Nature is "materializing." I can discover nothing humanizing in the one or the other, except through the spirit with which they are studied, and I know by experience that the spirit with which the study of the Latin and Greek grammars is often enforced is most demoralizing. Those who have been born with a facility for language may laugh at this statement; but a boy who has been held up to ridicule for the want of a good verbal memory, denied him by his Creator, long remembers the depressing effect produced, if not the malignity aroused, by the cruelty. Many are the men, now eminent in literature as well as science, who have experienced the tyranny of a classical school, so graphically described in the autobiography of Anthony Trollope; and many are the boys who might have been highly educated if their perceptive faculties had been cultivated, whose career as scholars has been cut short by the same tyranny.

Again, a great deal has been said about specialization at an early age, as if the study of Nature were specializing while the study of Latin metres and Greek accents was liberalizing. But how could specialization be more strikingly illustrated than by a system which limits a boy's attention between the ages of twelve and twenty to linguistic studies to the almost entire exclusion of a knowledge of that universe in which his life is to be passed, and which so limits his intellectual training that his powers of observation are left undeveloped, his judgments in respect to material relations unformed, and even his natural conceptions of truth distorted? Now, although a special culture which has such mischievous results as these may be necessary in order to command that power over language which marks the highest literary excellence, and although a university should foster this culture by all legitimate means, yet to enforce it upon every boy who aspires to be