Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/777

Rh were all in its favor, that the Christ of the Church is unhistorical; when a man like Clifford says he parted with Christian beliefs "with such searching trouble as only cradle faiths can cause"; when a historian like ex-President White, of Cornell, declares that the anthropologists have destroyed the whole theological theory of the fall of man!

The significance of all this lies here. Our institutions of learning were all founded upon theories of life, of mind, of society, of history, which have broken down. There is not a single one that has stood the test of modern science, and disintegration set in some time back. It came first in a demand that colleges should furnish a knowledge of matters that books and periodicals were teeming with, and for which there was no provision in the curriculum. It came from those who objected to fooling away their time in the study of languages that had proved their unfitness for the needs of mankind, and so had perished from off the face of the earth; who objected to be forced to the study of history that was not true. A sop was offered by some institutions in the shape of scientific courses where instruction was given in the new sciences—physics, chemistry, geology, etc. These, however, were treated in a most unworthy manner by text-books and discourses instead of by practice; second, as if they were topics unrelated to each other, and thus, having no necessary relations to other matters held to be of much greater importance; and, third, the men who pursued them to the exclusion of the old curriculum were snubbed and made to appear as of an inferior grade. Under such circumstances, what should be expected but an educational failure? The institutions, as institutions, felt a profound contempt for the new demand, apparently considering it a kind of craze which in a little time would die out, and matters would settle back into the historical ways which time had honored and experience approved. As we now know, nothing of the kind happened, for the very good reason that the old curriculum and the new knowledge were incompatibles. The new knowledge was not and could not be assimilated by the adherents of the old. Amalgamation to any extent was impossible, and compromise was equally impossible, for the new has destroyed the foundations of nearly everything the old held to be true.

What wonder, then, is it to-day that educational institutions show such visible signs of fermentation! Metamorphosis is taking place rapidly. Among schoolmasters one hears a good deal about pedagogy, but the pedagogy is a mongrel, a kind of cross between a theory built upon experience with minds fed on abnormal diet, and a metaphysics as extinct as the dodo. I feel like advising all such to go to Clark University and study psychology.

The pedagogy which is in consonance with the new psychology