Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/386

380 is directed toward efficiency in some art. (Here the term art is used in its original and broadest sense, to include any method of action that is recognized and adopted as the means appropriate to achieve some definite, specific purpose.) We may then conclude that an education is liberal in so far as it makes for manhood and personality, technical in so far as it makes for efficiency in some art. And we proceed to consider why it is that at the present time we find the liberal opposed to and contrasted with the technical trend of education.

In ancient Athens the aim set before each citizen was, fundamentally, to be a good citizen; and in mastering that art he realized also personality and manhood. Here the technical and the liberal in education seemed in perfect accord. And it was so in the Rome of Cicero and Quintilian, when the education of the orator was looked on as the fullest development of personality. And, in primitive and medieval Christianity, the fullest realization of the soul in that life-long education which should bring salvation in the knowledge and love of God was the very education which should fit the man also for the one supreme art, the extension of God's kingdom here upon earth. So too the knight, the warrior of the medieval system, could not distinguish the education which should make him a perfect knight, from that which should make him a perfect man.

During the renaissance there appeared and flourished a type of education which had in view the cultured gentleman, rather than the perfection of any art to which he might or might not apply his powers. 13ut even here the liberal was not contrasted with the technical, though in later times there developed from this renaissance ideal the still persistent concept of a "gentleman" who might best attain culture when aloof from the general life of toil. But what is most noteworthy in the renaissance, whether we consider its birth in the free Italian cities, its culmination in Luther and Bacon, or its close in Milton, is not unworthily summed up in the ideal of education which Milton himself thus expressed: "I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform, justly, skillfully and magnanimously, all the offices both private and public of peace and war." Still then it was thought that a man might attain efficiency in every art and therein find his perfect freedom and full realization.

The sense of opposition between the liberal and the technical in education is not to be found in Huxley or in Spencer, who best express to us the scientific in contrast with the humanistic vision of liberal education. Indeed, both these men were criticized, even in their own day, for failure to see that to be "in harmony with nature" or to strive after a comprehensive knowledge of the various fields of science is not the best preparation for most occupations, and is indeed hardly possible in view of the necessity for the thorough acquaintance with some limited field of science and knowledge which modern conditions seem to demand.