Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/64

60 is still thought to indicate a definite degree of mental growth and moral strength!

The situation, therefore, calls at once for examination reform, but it calls also for far more: we must harmonize under a sufficiently large ideal the various phases of developmental education. The elementary school, the secondary school, the college, have not yet been viewed and organized as essentially a single educational institution. Pending and in aid of their reorganization on this basis, I urge the colleges to emphasize the vital, not the mechanical, side of preparatory teaching; to establish fixedly no machinery that may impede the creation of a system subtly adapted to the individual. Our sore need now is of an intellect that shall conceive as a single whole the progression from childhood to maturity; that shall embody this progression in a connected series of educational institutions, from which every false, every mechanical, every pedantic test and motive shall have disappeared. Throughout, the system must be dominated by the effort to organize the child in effective harmony with his environment—it must aim at nothing else; it must be satisfied with nothing less.