Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/68

56 accumulated science is clearly a system which proceeds upon this universal principle of development.

We liave said that the reflection of the time-spirit which education represents is always and necessarily a somewhat retarded image. It follows the time-spirit. It can not precede it. But were this all, the problem of education would be vastly easier than at present. Fallen as we are upon a scientific age, it would be a comfort to believe that the image of it shown in education would surely conform to it, however slowly. But unfortunately the plate upon which this reflection is thrown is far from free. It bears already the deep impressions of many previous images. At any moment our education reflects not only the living Zeitgeist, but also, and even more clearly, the dead standards of a long past. It is seldom that a man arises among us who has sufficiently clear vision to distinguish these several images and apply the upper one to the needs of childhood. It is comparatively easy to refute a sophistry with a new face. It is tremendously difficult to escape the power of a sophistry to which you have been born, and in the presence of whose illogic you have always lived. It takes genius to escape.

But suppose now for one brief moment that we could apply a sponge to this complex plate of ours not from the front, for that would remove the image we most wish to preserve; but from the back, removing image after image until we came to the last and uppermost—what do you think we should remove, and what let stand, in our current education? I think we should erase much and leave but little. Let us see.

The human infant is a much less complex thing than we are wont to think. It is plastic and general; for the most part a mere bundle of possibilities. And we stand to it in the relation of Fate or Destiny. We have given to us a tiny organism with little individual will or intelligence. The influences to which we subject this organism constitute the educative process.

There are two elements to be considered. First of all, there is wrapped up in this tiny ball of organized matter an inherent tendency more inexorable than the predestination taught by Calvin. We call it heredity. It is the gift, for good or ill, of fathers and great-grandfathers, of mothers and great-grandmothers, for many generations back. The fairy godmothers who come in the story book to every child's christening represent a scientific fact. The talents they bestow, the fatal limitations they inflict, are not by chance. They are the qualities of ancestry.

A system of education neglecting this element of heredity neglects a determining cause, and is fundamentally unscientific. But it is an element largely beyond the control of the teacher. All he can do is to develop these germs, or discourage them, as