Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/243

Rh no real difficulty, if we could once rid ourselves of those narrow views of education which bound it by the walls of the schoolroom, and can see no way of learning anything except by getting it out of a book. Education, in the proper sense of the word, is that course of training which will best fit an individual for the business of life, or, to speak more accurately, will best enable him to adjust himself in harmony with his environment. The kind of education that is best for any person will depend, therefore, very much upon what his environment is to be; and as it certainly can not be maintained that the environment of the majority of mankind is such as to require a very great amount of book-learning, it may reasonably be asked whether some of our popular theories of education do not need remodeling. By this I do not mean that our facilities for higher education should be in any way diminished, but only that we should use a little more discrimination in applying them, and bestow the highest advantages where they are likely to do most good. Many well-meaning teachers labor under the idea that they must spend their best energies upon dull pupils, and go on for years throwing away their time in trying to accomplish what the homely wisdom of our fathers has pronounced the impossible task of making a "silk purse out of a sow's ear." Trim your sow's ear, clean it and comb it and make as decent and reputable a sow's ear out of it as you can, by all means, but don't put your gold and pearls into it, under the belief that it is a silk purse. As our Georgia farmers say, put your guano on your best land, and you will get a paying crop.

Each department of the world's work can be best carried on by those who are fitted for it. The intellectual work, like every other, can be carried on with success only by those who have some capacity for it, and, by bestowing an elaborate intellectual training upon all alike, without regard to natural qualifications, we damage both the state and the individual: the state, by wasting its resources in unremunerative intellectual products; the individual, by leading him into fields where he is forced into competition with those better equipped for the struggle for existence, and against whom, by the inexorable law of the "survival of the fittest," he has no chance to contend with success.

Where people have money to pay for the education of their children, there is, of course, no remedy; and in our private schools and colleges we may expect always to see rich blockheads grinding through the process of what they call getting an education; but where the state pays the cost it has a right to see that its money is spent so as to secure the greatest benefit to all concerned. This can be done by a rigid system of grading, each school being a stepping-stone to the next higher. Let a