Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/430

414. A good and well-equipped high-school can not, as things now are, be maintained in every village and township. We may have the name of the thing, but the reality we can not have. If the system could be worked at all it could probably be worked as successfully in Massachusetts as in any State of the Union; but President Eliot tells us that it does not work well there at all, and that, owing to the poverty of the great majority of the schools, a gap which ought not to exist, and which is inconsistent with the theory of the public-school system, has established itself between the so-called high-schools and the colleges. The schools ought to prepare their students for matriculation at the colleges; but the most of them neither do nor can do anything of the kind.

What applies to the high-schools applies also, generally speaking, to the colleges themselves. They are not what they ought to be, simply because there are too many of them. The consequence is, that there is a great deal of false and shallow culture abroad in the land. A college ought to be a place where a youth would be certain to come into contact with men of an altogether superior order of thought and attainment. It ought to be the center of a true intellectual life. Of all our colleges, how many answer this description? It is needless to say that the country does not possess a sufficient number of men of real intellectual mark to fill all the chairs in our innumerable "colleges." If it did, we should indeed be exceptionally favored. Now, the effect of shallow learning tricking itself out in the garb of real erudition is to confuse all intellectual perceptions and standards. We do not say that a little learning is a dangerous thing, but we say that a little learning that mistakes itself for great learning is apt to make more or less of a fool or a charlatan of its possessor. We do not know whether there is much to be gained by struggling against what seems to be one of the main currents of the time; but we are profoundly convinced that the cause of American culture calls for concentration not dispersion of effort, for centralization as opposed to localization, for the sinking of petty rivalries in the endeavor to found strong, permanent, and widely beneficial institutions. Let our common schools which penetrate everywhere be placed on as sound a basis as possible; let high-schools be established in centers where they can be vigorously and generously sustained; let our colleges and universities be proportioned in number to the need actually existing for the highest culture, and let them have such support as national and individual interest in such culture prompts—and we shall then have all the necessary means for making the American people the equals in education of any other nation in the world. At present we have a vast but somewhat disjointed apparatus, and the results, however soothing they may be in some respects to democratic pride, are, from the point of view of national culture, far from satisfactory.

call particular attention to the weighty testimony of Dr. Edward Frankland, the eminent English chemist and sanitarian, to the claims of the Yellowstone National Park as a great American health resort in winter for invalids with chest and pulmonary difficulties. Dr. Frankland has investigated this subject long and carefully, and is especially familiar with the conditions and effects of the celebrated Engadine Swiss sanitarium in the valley of Davos. Dr. Frankland came to this country last summer, attended the British Association at Montreal, and, having heard much of the Yellowstone Park, he went there and spent considerable time in examining its claims as a great winter sanitarium for the American people. He contributes to the "Monthly" a valuable