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Among the articles to appear in forthcoming issues are: Educational advancement and the new federation, by Professor Edward C. Elliott, University of Wisconsin.

Practical education for industrial workers, by Principal William H. Dooley, Industrial School, Lawrence, Mass.

Elective system and the Scottish universities, by Professor R. H. Wenley, University of Michigan.

The educational significance of Minot's theory of age and growth, by Professor Francis Ramaley, University of Colorado.

A series of Contributions to the history of American teaching, begun in the September issue, will include personal reminiscences as to teachers, textbooks, courses of study, school discipline, and other interesting details not to be found in official records or publications. Among early contributors to this novel and interesting series will be Charles W. Eliot, Aaron Gove, and Rt. Rev. William Croswell Doane.

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EDUCATIONAL REVIEW

SEPTEMBER, 1909

I

COLLEGE REQUIREMENTS IN LATIN AND THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM1

'Thou art the man."

One need not be a constant reader of the current educational publications to know that there is widespread uneasiness among the friends of Latin learning. It is not necessary to enter the hall in which the latest assembly of classical teachers is convened to detect the current of anxiety in the atmosphere on the sidewalk outside even you feel that something or other is not quite as it should be. The octopus has gobbled all but a straggling remnant of the Greeks, and now, alas, the bandersnatch is reaching out after the Latins. Now and then, to be sure, some cheerful optimist drags forth a fresh batch of statistics showing clearly that not all is lost, but rather much gained, and we smile hopefully and congratulate each other and clap our neighbor on the back and go home, knowing all the time, in the deep of our heart, that the case is and remains desperate with no known remedy in our pedagogical pharmacopoeia. The worst of it all, perhaps, is our own discouragement. We feel ourselves to be a forlorn hope of classicalism, fighting a losing battle against impossible odds.

Much reflection has revealed a multitude of causes for this state of things. American education is a hybrid thing, a

Read at the meeting of the New Hampshire Classical Association, October 17, 1908.

kind of modern Minotaur, devouring our youth and leaving little but dry bones. With British beginnings and German accretions, it has not yet found itself, nor have we found ourselves in it. College ideals and university ideals are at odds within it, and we have not yet succeeded in blending them. The result is, of necessity, heterogeneous, unsystematic, and wasteful. In a century or so, perhaps, we shall have completed the evolution of an American type of education. In the meantime we must take the consequences of our rash attempt to harmonize two things radically different in nature. That there is something wrong, and very wrong, is admitted in a thousand tacit ways even by those professional pedagogues who hurrah loudest for American ways and methods. What are we to think of the countless" fads," of which our children have been the helpless victims, the "mud pie" subjects, the cross-cuts and royal-road-to-learning methods, which have so widely crowded out the notion of sound culture? They are the blind efforts of men who realize that something is not as it should be, but do not know what, or how or why. Many of them are so wild that a grain of common sense condemns them on sight, and yet they find sober advocates.

We are reminded that this is an age of materialism, and that America is too young to be anything but exceedingly materialistic. Our boys want to study something practical, and their fathers demand for them a training which will repay its cost, principal and interest, in hard dollars. Culture is very well indeed, no doubt, but it will never pay water rates and coal bills. Nice appreciation of golden Latinity will perhaps ornament a man, but what we want is something which will buy him bread and butter to spread it with. Let us have practical education,-away with the dead tongues! That this position is logically unsound as well as gross makes no difference to the practical mind of the American. We schoolmasters know that the so-called "practical subjects' have no more real earning power than the culture courses. German and French are rated as practical. and the history of banking and the like. a high place among the practicals—and so on.

So are economics
Mathematics has

But the veriest

tyro knows that in more than ninety-nine per cent. of cases the college graduate earns nothing with the knowledge he has acquired in his "practical" courses. Again, does the collegian who wants a sound body go to work to develop it with "practical" exercises? Does he drive stakes or beat carpets to get his arms and trunk into condition? Yet the "practical" argument has overwhelming force in our education in directing the choice of courses.

The college instructors, who are our natural mentors, have a way of bringing the matter a little nearer home to us of the secondary school. We are told with varying degrees of politeness that we are ill-prepared for our work. We have the courage to take up the task of instructing beginners with a little more than half the necessary equipment. We do not begin to rank with our European colleagues in point of breadth and depth of scholarship. Many of us do not know what the vocative of deus is, nor do we know where to look for the last word on the subject. We are, in a word, enthusiastic and conscientious, but ignorant.

Worse yet, the reproachful voice goes on, our pupils go up to the colleges with no real interest in Latin, and it is our fault. We are a band of dry-as-dusts, or else we are intent upon marrying and giving in marriage, and care not at all whether our pupils are touched with the divine fire. Many of us too are not really teachers-we are teaching for a year or two only, until something better turns up, or until we can get together money to study law or divinity or medicine. Naturally we have no great interest in classical studies ourselves and less to communicate to our pupils. And so we make our Latin work dry and uninteresting, and many a potential Bentley or Lachmann is nipt in the bud by the cold blast of our indifference.

But that is not all. As a natural consequence of such shortcomings and deficiencies, we do not get good results. Our boys, when they do get into college, are wofully ignorant of many first principles. Many of them do not seem to have any real grasp of the elementary syntax. Some of them think that Augustus reigned as late as 500 or even

1500 A.D. One professor in a New England college, a most fair-minded and charming man, addressing some secondary teachers not long ago, remarked in a very modest and winning way: "As a matter of fact, you do not send your boys up to college with the ability to read easy Attic prose at sight." No doubt the same thing is true of Latin, and holds good of the candidates for other colleges as well. Our methods, then, are not adapted to the task before us, and we do not do our work well enough to suit the colleges.

It seems, then, that the colleges are not satisfied with us. On the other hand, most of us are thoroly dissatisfied with the colleges, and many of us sincerely believe that they are largely, in fact primarily, responsible for the decadence of Latin studies in this country, and that the battle is surely lost forever if they do not mend their ways. What shall we

say in our defense?

In any discussion of the situation before us, one fundamental fact must be premised and thoroly understood. College instructors do not understand the problems of the secondary school, and with the rarest exceptions are not competent to direct preparatory work or to give good advice about it. This proposition will, no doubt, be disputed, first of all by the college man himself, but every thoughtful schoolmaster will recognize its truth. Whenever we call in a college man to address a meeting of schoolmasters we find at the end of a few sentences that we have a theorist before us with little or no practical grasp of his problem. Strange as it may seem, those who have had a season of preparatory teaching before being called to the college are soon no better than the others. It is nothing less than astonishing to see how rapidly the point of view changes in such cases. In a year or two, even in a few months, your newfledged college teacher has forgotten the school and all that went with it. This inability to understand the problems of secondary work is shown beyond all doubt by the character of the elementary textbooks prepared by college instructors, a matter which I hope to discuss in a later paper.

All of us who have had an opportunity to observe the

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