Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/509

Rh specific useful facts that the children remember in after years, but by the general influence upon their lives. You perhaps remember that incident of Garfield. He relates that he once heard Emerson lecture, and that it was for him the beginning of a new life. Yet all he could remember of the lecture was one of those bullet sentences of Emerson's—"Men are as lazy as they dare to be." It is quite possible to fire the imagination of men and women, and have them clean forget whether it was by an electric spark or a tallow candle—or neither.

But when we look at our educational structure, and note what tremendously extended foundations it has, what an almost unending vista is presented by the lower schools, and then see how palpably it shrinks in rising upward to the high school and college, what a very low pyramid it forms after all, I can not but feel that the influence of these schools in arousing children to the higher life has been quite as weak as has been their informational capacity.

I do feel that in failing to impart abounding life and health, in failing to arouse a keen interest in the many beautiful sides of life, these schools are partly responsible for the apathy and ennui that you read in the faces of middle-age and middle-class America.

The wise sequence does not lie at either extreme—either seven weeks a year for three or four years, or ten months a year for a score or more of years. The present sequence in our older communities runs somewhat as follows: the kindergarten up to six years; the elementary school for about eight years; the high school, four years; the college, four years; the graduate, technical, or professional course, from three to six years. The educational process begins with very tender baby flesh, and ends with pretty solid men and women. It is not one day too long if it lead irresistibly to the radiant life. It is many years too long if it lead to ill health, to apathy, to hopelessness, if it lead to loss of initiatory power, to pedantry, to conventionality, to cowardice. It is a question of the quality of the results. Even this elaborate process, however, is not yet correlated and continuous. The lower schools and the high schools have been brought into pretty close relations, since both are commonly under public administration, but even here, in many of our cities, a remnant of the old apartness remains in the entrance examination to which the children are obliged to submit at the doors of the high school. Curiously, the public administration is not willing to accept its own stamp of approval or blame as set by the lower schools. But between the high schools and the colleges there is a very noticeable gap. The two are under different administrations, and in our less enlightened communities they are not infrequently antagonistic. There are now, however, associations throughout the