which need not be here discussed. I allude to it because the college requirements seem to me at fault in the encouragement they give the schools to confuse the study of literature with the allied but distinct studies of language and composition. We should take care that students be not insensibly brought to regard the greatest creations of the English genius chiefly in the light of possible composition subjects. I have too unspeakable a reverence for literature to wish to see it tied to the heels of spelling, grammar, and composition, an after-thought and perhaps a concession. Introduced in such a fashion, literature, while nominally a part of our college entrance requirements, is still virtually excluded.

What has so far been said has been written mainly with reference to preparatory schools for boys, but it must be remembered that should girls' schools become more strictly preparatory, as they seem likely to do, the same questions would arise in them, but in a greatly aggravated form. For while in boys' schools the college requirements tend to prevent the proper study of a subject yet hardly established in the curriculum, in girls' schools, if adhered to by the women's colleges, they would seriously interfere with a study now often placed in the front rank. In the case of one woman's college I have had frequent opportunities of testing in schools the working value of the required English selections, and experience has demonstrated how seriously unwise and apparently haphazard selections interfere with the teaching of literature.

I have written in the hope that the college requirements in this subject may be changed while the place of English literature in our entire educational system is still tentative and changing. As I am able to see it, our colleges, whether for men or women, are at present using their authority to compel desultory reading as one of their requirements for entrance. The requirements in English should be so changed as to substitute for desultory reading the study of English literature.

PHILADELPHIA, PA.

HENRY S. PANCOAST.

IV.

CERTAIN DANGEROUS TENDENCIES IN EDUCA.

TION.

We are now under the full influence of a great movement of thought, essentially socialistic in character. In time we shall be carried, by the wave-like progress of humanity, to an extreme of individualism; but, until this corrective tendency sets in, it behooves us to see how far the present movement will carry us. In many of its results a socialistic trend is beneficial. Some of its immediate effects, now so portentous, will quickly disappear. But at several points its influence has been distinctly bad. One of the social problems deeply affected by it is that of public education. Here the socialistic factor in human progress is spreading out of safe bounds into the region of wild experiment, with grave menace to our government. There exists a perversion of the public mind on this vital question, a perversion which finds its logical climax in the recent demand of an Alderman of Boston for a free public university.

Education is man's safeguard against his own ignorance. Ignorance and idleness are usually synonymous, and idleness is the mother of crime. Give a child a proper education, and he is endowed with power: power to think, power to act. He may use his power to think and act wrongly, but experience shows that he will think and act mainly toward the right. Since, to the State, crime, when it preponderates, is death, free schools are a necessity. But this necessity conceded, what sort of education is to be given freely, and how far is it to go? It is here that the socialistic tendency is, in my judgment, dangerous. The socialists and those who in the line of education, if in no other, are socialists, would burden the free school with subjects and methods belonging to the home, and would carry free education to a time of life when, by the

suppression of individual effort, moral stamina are weakened, and when, as a measure of common safety, school education is no longer necessary.

The home and the school are two wholly different forces brought to bear upon the growing child. Each has its proper sphere, and the methods of the one have no place in the system of the other. Judiciously exerted, one supplementing the other, these two influences should produce patriotic, moral, wellbalanced citizens. No argument is needed to prove the unfitness of school methods to home training; there should be no need of proof that home methods have little or no place in the school. The child whose parents treat him from the standpoint of the pedagogue, is a pitiful creature, starved morally, surfeited mentally. A child who has been trained in a "home" school, by methods which have no right beyond the walls of a house, is even less well fitted for good citizenship. Home training should be always indirect, persuasive; school training direct, authoritative. Home training must be suggestive; school training, mandatory. Home training should be mainly by example; school training by fact and precept. Home training must leave free play to the child's mental growth; school training must prune and control that growth. The home fits the child to be a man, the school prepares him to be a citizen; one is natural, common to humanity, the other artificial, peculiar to the State. It is seldom that the proper combination of these two elements is reached. The Scholastics took away love, making morality an abstraction; the sentimentalists, whose heirs we are, took away duty, making morality a passion. The right moral training tempers love with duty and duty with love. This moral training can be perfected only within the home. School life is but a mental gymnasium in which to make the child receptive and acquisitive.

To emphasize this training, the home must be made the center of the child's existence. No stronger force exists to make it so than the double one of sacrifice and gratitude, the force of mutual obligation. There should be always present a

sense of duty on the part of the parent, to give the child such moral and mental armor as he can; and a corresponding sense of obligation on the part of the child to repay the self-denial of the parent by exertion to do his will.

But the socialistic idea of education destroys completely all necessity for sacrifice on the part of the parent, and all motive, therefore, for gratitude on the part of the child, and in time, all motive for that child, grown to maturity in ignorance of filial gratitude, to interest himself, much less to sacrifice himself, in the matter of his children's education. The tendency of the modern school is to restrict the duty of the parent to that of feeding and clothing the child. The father is to become a mere machine for supplying the material wants of the next generation. All higher duties are to be relegated to a special class, just as in the Middle Ages they were given to the priests with what results, we know. The primitive races gave to their young such food and shelter as they could; an ambition to do more than this has, through long centuries, produced civilization. Destroy parental responsibility and the one concrete motive for human progress has disappeared. The French noblesse, sending their infants to peasant fostermothers, brought themselves, thereby, to the guillotine. Abstract precepts, the knowledge of right and wrong, will never supplant, as moral forces, the actual presence of children to whom ethics must be taught by example. If the State, that nonentity for which each one of us, and therefore, none of us, is responsible, is to bring up my children for me; if morality, good manners, and the domestic virtues are to be taught by someone else while I am but to provide the material things of life ; then, forsooth, I will lay aside such sums as may meet these temporal wants, and with the balance, large or small, will eat, drink, and be merry; for surely I have no better use in the world. The fact that in a few generations the State will fall to pieces is not for me to consider, since I am credibly informed that the sacred duty of maintaining it is taught in the schools. This wicked and absurd result of socialism is, of course, extreme. There are, fortunately, human tendencies

retarding such a mad career as this. Of these are avarice, making us save even where there is no direct motive for saving; family pride, unwilling to resign the task of shaping its heirs; and, above all, parental love, refusing to deny itself to its offspring.

Socialism in school matters is, beyond its narrowest interpretation, wholly without warrant. Once having established the machinery of free schools, once having placed proper safeguards for its maintenance and protection, the State should determine the least that it must do to preserve its integrity and provide for its healthy growth. It should then rigidly exclude from the school all that belongs to the parent, as well as all that, being non-essential to the life of the State, ought to be left to individual effort. In following this course there can be no rigidity of rule. So diverse is our population that no general system of public education is possible. The hordes of immigrants, low and brutish, must be upheld by the strong arm of the majority through so many generations as it may require to bring them, mentally and morally, to the level of the older population. For them a socialistic scheme of education must be arranged under which they are to be brought by force or by persuasion. But for all rural districts, for many of the smaller cities, and for the better wards of large cities— in all which regions the good outweigh the bad-the integ rity of the family must not be disturbed, honorable ambition must be encouraged, and the school must be kept to its proper sphere. Otherwise our republic will be of but short duration.

The socialistic tendency has brought about, in many of the United States, the passage of laws not warranted by such a view as this. Chief among these are the laws establishing high schools and those providing free text-books. The first are wrong in so far only as they make the high school absolutely free; the second, while justifiable in theory, are wrong in practice.

The maintenance of free high schools is unwise, first, because it obliges a whole community to pay for what only a limited number can enjoy; second, because, necessarily expen