Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/284

270 for the latter years of a liberal educational culture as a general one, equally enforced on all, is for the earliest. And it further follows that, if at this later period the student is permitted to follow the bent which his previous training has served to develop, his choice will fall upon those studies which are in harmony with his bent without any reference to the question whether they are, in the common sense of the word, "easy" studies or "difficult." For these terms "easy" and "difficult" as applied to matters which concern the understanding, admit of two quite different modes of definition.

No mental pursuit is easy if it be distasteful, no matter how small the labors its prosecution demands; and no similar pursuit is difficult if pleasing, even though to follow it may exact the severest and the most persistently sustained exercise of the faculties. And, in corroboration of the truth of this proposition, it may here be stated that, in Columbia College, under the system which permits the members of the senior class to select, for the most part, studies which they prefer to pursue, there is no lack of volunteers for a subject commonly reported to be so difficult and forbidding as the calculus, or as obscure as the metaphysics; nor is there, on the other hand, any observable predominance in the number who select a branch so fascinating as physics, or so practical as technology or chemistry.

The distribution has been, in fact, approximately equal among all the studies presented for option. And this result is one which we may reasonably look for when parallel courses of study are offered to the choice of the student during the later years of the academic course, whatever might be true if the offer were made at the beginning. For the effect of the early years of training is to bring out the character of each individual mind, and to determine what are its native idiosyncrasies, and what it is possible to make of it. And though the doctrine that all the faculties of all minds should be developed as far as possible by appropriate educational exercise and discipline is a true doctrine, yet the doctrine that all faculties of all minds are equally capable of development is a fallacy which no enlightened educator will think of maintaining.

That every faculty should receive its fair amount of fostering attention is certainly just and right, but to expect that this fair amount or that any amount of individual culture, however laborious, will secure to every individual an equal power or chance of success in any given direction—as, for instance, in poetry or mathematical research—is as unreasonable as to expect that every sapling in a nursery may, by proper care, be made equally prolific of fruit. After all that has been said about the desirability and the importance of symmetrical mental development, and of the duty of shaping the educational culture with a view to secure such a development, the simple fact is that all minds develop themselves unsymmetrically, just as certainly as that different minerals crystallize into different geometrical figures; and that it is just as hopeless for the educationist to look for that ideal conformity and perfection of mental proportion among his pupils which has been so much insisted on as the end at which education should aim as it would be for the chemist to attempt by his science to compel all his salts to crystallize into spheres.

The great evil of the invariable curriculum of study in our colleges at the present time is that it makes it impossible, at least after the end of the second year of the course, to teach any subject with satisfactory thoroughness. From an examination of the programme of instruction in Columbia College for the junior and senior years—I select my own college rather than another that my remarks may not seem invidious—it appears that if every student were compelled to take every subject, and if to every subject should be given an equal proportion of the available time, no single subject, if pursued continuously, could occupy a longer period than about a month. How is it possible to expect results satisfactory either to instructor or to learner from such a state of things as this? There is no remedy for the evil but that of permitting the student to concentrate his attention upon those subjects which are most in harmony with his native bent, and to leave the others to those to whom they in turn may be more acceptable.

"No apology is needed for printing the long article of M. de Laveleye in reply to Herbert Spencer, together with the latter's brief rejoinder. The Belgian state socialist is a man of mark, who believes in the extension of the powers of government for the general purposes of philanthropy; and it was natural that he should see the need of breaking the force of Spencer's argument. But, quite regardless of that result, his paper is of interest as revealing the condition of mind of a man admitted to be strong in politics