Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/161

Rh science which embodies the largest a priori elements with the least possible external elements.

I have said that education is a purely deductive science, and the reason now becomes plain. It is necessarily a secondary science, since it depends, not upon any self-contained principles which may be brought to light by careful inductive reasoning, but solely and entirely upon external considerations—that is to say, upon the social ideals growing out of our accepted ethics and philosophy, and upon the methods which our current psychology suggests as the proper means of realizing those ideals. It is for this reason impossible to study education, and much less any specific scheme of education, such as manual training, at first hand, as a thing in itself. Education can not evolve its own laws, can not be said to have any definitely discernible end and purpose of its own. It is purely a process—a delicate, subtle process by which psychological methods are made use of to attain social ends. In saying this, one does not belittle the function of education; one magnifies it. I should then be treating manual training in a most superficial way, alike unjust to it and to the reader, if I considered it other than I propose to consider it—as a part of a larger plan.

Emerson, and others less inspired than he, have repeatedly pointed out to us how prone we are to mistake the means for the end. And this is nowhere more marked than in education. We start out very badly as students of education when we erect it into an end in itself. It is very far from being an end. It is simply a means, the servant of a higher science, the servant of the social ideal.

I have always cherished a sympathetic interest in the progress of American architecture. It is an interest that survives the years, and I constantly find myself looking at new buildings and at old with half-closed eyes, and through my lashes—which they tell me is a sure sign of the artistic temperament. But, be this as it may, what I see, even with half-closed eyes, does not, in the main, please me. I see a dreary succession of unbeautiful buildings. And I ask myself the cause. The American schools of architecture are admirable. The work done in several of them will bear comparison with the best work done at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the École des Beaux-Arts is, I believe, the Mecca of all our young architects. And in contemporary architecture it is not boastful, I think, to say that America is abreast of the world. Nowhere in Europe will you find more beautiful modern buildings than the Public Library in Boston, the Madison Square Garden in New York, or the Pennsylvania Station, before it was spoiled, in Philadelphia. And yet the mass of our buildings are hopelessly ugly. Many of these aberrations are due to poor architects, for the profession is not