Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/362

358 It may be questioned whether the glorification of our educational ideals, and the formal aspects of it in particular, has not been greatly overdone. In spite of more than a century of its trial the per cent, of illiteracy is still large. This I believe to be due to the fact that there has not been allowed to operate more freely the process of selection. Not all children arc fit for formal education. They have no business in either school or college, except in the former for the merest rudiments of learning. For them the apprenticeship, the trade-school, the vocational fitting, is that through which nature may afford some chance for a place. Many a boy should never be encouraged to go to college, and would not if any pains had been taken to look into his mental pedigree. He is sent in many cases out of mere fashion, a sort of social exaction which has for him only a social significance, or value, wholly beneath the aim of a college standard of any real dignity or worth. And as in the school, only more so, his presence involves the same low and compromising standard and reaction upon all concerned.

Let the gauntlet be thrown down without hesitation or apology—Distinctly academic culture, education for scholarly ends, is not for all. Aye, more, the ordinary school is not for all. Is this akin to treason, a direct challenge of the compulsory school laws? I do not overlook the beneficent aim of these laws. No more need one shut the eyes to another code, that for prevention of cruelty to animals. To how many of us has it occurred that occasion for the latter may as often be found under the former, or in other words, that truant officers and a system which makes them necessary are as amenable to the latter code as are those who torture horses or beat helpless wives? The cruelty of which I protest is that which thoughtlessly or ignorantly grinds every intellectual grist through a common hopper. The schools do not differentiate, teachers do not discriminate between matters of quality and quantity as mental factors. An expert in nervous disorders said in a recent address before a public assembly in Syracuse that "New York State schools contribute a larger quota to the insane asylums than any other agency." This might be variously construed, but surely it should give us pause in our zeal for compulsory education. But these laws are not designedly vicious; they only express misapprehension, they fail to discriminate.

Galton has shown beyond reasonable doubt that genius follows the same laws which control other phases of development. Indeed the earlier pioneer work of Galton blazed out the path which our later experimental methods have demonstrated, over and over again, to be now almost a highway, so clear is its course, so readily followed. Concerning this very matter of discrimination and selection he made bold to declare:

I believe that if the eminent men of any period had been changelings when babies, a very large proportion of those who survived and retained health up to fifty years of age would, notwithstanding their altered circumstances, have arisen to eminence. Now if the hindrances to success were very great, we should