Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/487

Rh When a "higher education" is demanded, for any class of persons—as women—it means that it has become desirable to train their faculties for more difficult work than that traditionally assigned to them, and also that it is desirable to enable them to get more enjoyment out of any work that they do. The necessary correlative of the possession of powers is the opportunity for their exercise. The existence of a larger class of effectively educated women must increase their demand for a larger share in that part of the world's work which requires trained intelligence. Of this, literature and other art is one and only one portion. The work of the professions, of the upper regions of industry, commerce, and finance, the work of scientific and of political life, is the work appropriate to the intelligences which have proved themselves equal to a course of training at once complex and severe. A person destined to receive a superior education is expected to develop more vigorous mental force, to have a larger mental horizon, to handle more complex masses of ideas, than another. From the beginning, therefore, he must not merely receive useful information, but be habituated to perform difficult mental operations, for only in this way can the sum of mental power be increased. The order, arrangement, and sequence of the ideas he acquires must be as carefully planned as is the selection of the ideas themselves, because upon this order and internal proportion his mental horizon depends. He must be trained in feats of sustained attention, and in the collocation and association of elementary ideas into complex combinations. Since ideas are abstractions from sense-perceptions, he must be exercised in the acquisition of accurate, rapid, far-reaching, and delicate sense perceptions, in their memorization, and in the representative imagination which may recall them at will, and be able to abstract from them, more or less remotely, ideas. Habits of rich association of ideas must be formed, and of pleasure in their contemplation. And very early must be offered to the child problems to be solved, either by purely mental exertion, or by that combined with manual labor. And all this care must be taken for girls as well as for boys, so soon as it is seriously agreed that girls may be admitted to a superior as well as to a primary education.

The first intellectual faculties to be trained are perception and memory. The subjects of the child's first studies should therefore be selected, not on account of their ultimate utility, but on account of their influence upon the development of these faculties. What sense is there, then, in beginning education with instruction in the arts of reading and writing? If literature were the main business of life, or if, as was at one time supposed, education meant nothing else but acquaintance with literature, there would be some logic in the extraordinary prominence habitually assigned in education to the study of modes of literary expression. But, from the modern stand-point, that education means such an unfolding of the faculties as shall put the