Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 60.djvu/490

482 upon German gymnasia, offered such mental training as was supposed to be prerequisite for professional study. But new conditions arose with the close of that war—the country had discovered its mineral wealth and had accumulated capital for development; the world had learned of America, and its surplus population poured in upon us, ignorant of our laws, alien to our modes of thought, yet eligible to citizenship, to a voice in our government. At once, the demand arose for an education adapted to the needs of those who did not intend to become lawyers, clergymen or physicians, who required a broader, stronger training, fitting men to cope with the new difficulties and to solve the new problems.

It is true that, long before the Civil War, many eminent men had recognized the inherent defects in our college system. They asserted that training in classical languages should not be the important feature of college education; that the Roman church no longer controlled thought or education and that Latin had ceased to be the language of learned men, while changed conditions in professional study had rendered thorough knowledge of Greek equally unessential, so that those languages should be replaced by others as necessary now as those had been. The colleges themselves had recognized the transition and Latin and Greek were taught, with few exceptions, not with a view to impart knowledge of the tongues but with a view to mental training. In other words, Latin and Greek were employed for mental exercise as Indian clubs are employed for muscular exercise in a gymnasium. But no material change was made in curricula; natural science was introduced, but was taught in a most elementary way, while the most precious years of a lad's life were spent as before in monotonous study of 'paradigms and syntax.

The abrupt demand for better education found our colleges unprepared to meet it. The faculties were composed for the most part of men trained after the accepted method, students by habit, living in a cosmos of their own and conceiving of the outer world very largely as they constructed it on à priori principles. As they knew practically nothing about the conditions which made a radical change necessary, the demand was like a rude awakening. Makeshifts were offered as tubs thrown to a whale; subjects dealing with everyday life were introduced into the 'regular' course and the student was led to think in a somewhat 'lower intellectual plane,' that is to say, more nearly in accordance with the actual condition of things. Under the old system he was in the nineteenth century world, but very truly not of it; under the modified system, he was permitted, during part of the college hours, to be actually in touch with it; facts were dealt with sometimes in political economy, a bit of physiology found its way into psychology, the chemistry of common things became a legitimate subject of