Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/148

144 those which will help make the actual most of him and his life. Democracy of intellect does not mean equality of brains, still less indifference in regard to their quality. It means simply fair play in the schedule of studies. It means the development of fit courses of study, not traditional ones, of a 'tailor-made' curriculum for each man instead of the 'hand-me-down' article, misfitting all alike.

In the time of James II., Richard Rumbold 'never could believe that God had created a few men already booted and spurred, with millions already saddled and bridled for these few to ride.' In like fashion, Andrew Dickson White could never believe that God had created a taste for the niceties of grammar or even the appreciation of noble literature, these few tastes to be met and trained while the vast body of other talents were to be left unaided and untouched, because of their traditional inferiority. In unison with President White, Ezra Cornell declared that he 'would found an institution where any person could find instruction in any study.' In like spirit the Morrill Act was framed, bringing together all rays of various genius, the engineer, and the psychologist, the student of literature and the student of exact science, 'Greek-minded' men and tillers of the soil, each to do his own work in the spirit of equality before the law. Under the same roof each one gains by mutual association. The literary student gains in seriousness and power, the engineer in refinement and appreciation. Like in character is the argument for co-education, a condition encouraged by this same Morrill Act. The men become more refined from association with noble women, the women more earnest from association with serious men. The men are more manly, the women more womanly in co-education, a condition opposed alike to rowdyism and frivolity.

In the same line we must count the influence of Mark Tappan, perhaps the first to conceive of a state university, existing solely for the good of the state, to do the work the state most needs, regardless of what other institutions may do in other states. Agassiz in these same times insisted that advanced work is better than elementary, for its better disciplinary quality. He insisted that Harvard in his day was only 'a respectable high school, where they taught the dregs of education.' Thorough training in some one line he declared was the backbone of education. It was the base line by which the real student was enabled to measure scholarship in others.

In most of our colleges the attempt to widen the course of study by introducing desirable things preceded the discovery that general courses of study prearranged had no real value. We have learned all prescribed work is bad work unless it is prescribed by the nature of the subject. The student in electrical engineering takes to mathematics, because he knows that his future success with electricity