should devote our most ceaseless study. We may look at the matter from a purely utilitarian, egoistic viewpoint, or from the standpoint of social welfare, but in any case we must admit that functional efficiency will vary not only with brain-stretching but with brain-stocking. It is easy to think of education as the cramming of facts into the student; it is equally easy to fall into the opposite error of assuming that "education is training the student to think " irrespective of what he thinks about or with. Both labor and capital are necessary to the emergence of an economic product. Just so, both a mental process and a knowledge of subject-matter are necessary to the emergence of a mental product. This subject-matter, in most cases, is constituted by the individual's vocational and social environment-the environment in which all his mental processes have to functionize.

We may summarize our thought thus far as follows:

1. The function of the college is to develop potential efficiency.

2. Efficiency is both vocational and social in character. 3. Neither sort of efficiency can be developed without brain-stocking as well as brain-stretching.

4. The brain must be stocked above all with a large and sympathetic knowledge and understanding of environment.

5. To furnish this understanding is the primary function of the environmental or orientating subjects; secondarily, these subjects are very effective brain-stretchers.

Environment is either physical or vital. Vital environment again is either biological or social. It is the business of the natural sciences to give us the necessary knowledge of the physical and biological part of our surroundings. Somewhere, either partly in the high school and partly in the college, or wholly in the college, the student should have an elementary course in each of the sciences noted in the general foundational group. Each of them must almost of necessity have an element that is fundamentally and broadly cultural in the best sense. While there are many vocations that can worry along without a knowledge of astronomy, say, it is quite likely that the student who has acquired the interests which that science

can give will be a more broadly efficient worker than the student who has not acquired these interests. Every student should have not only a course in laboratory science, but above all a course in the history and present status of theories of organic evolution. Indeed it is a question whether such a course could not with equal propriety be classed among the social sciences as among the natural sciences. Modern thought and literature are so permeated by "evolution" that it is part of the mental atmosphere of practically every individual. At the same time comparatively few persons, even among the educated, know what evolution is, or how intricate and unsettled the questions of its method. Moreover, false and jump-out-of-the-box conceptions of evolution are a fruitful source of error in popular, and in not a little supposedly scientific, reasoning upon social matters.

Beyond the general foundational stage the individual natural sciences assume very definite quasi-vocational and vocational significance. They will be elected by the college student as the needs of his future vocation, and the demands the general foundational subjects must make upon his time, dic

tate.

Keeping in mind the primary purpose of the college, it is clear that the importance of the social sciences is even greater than that of the natural sciences. Just to the extent that knowledge of society with its great backgrounds of anthropological and ethnological origins, and of history, and with all its psychological, moral, legal, and economic forces and complex interactions, is necessary to the efficient functionizing of the individual in society-to that extent, at least, must the social sciences be given a place in the curriculum, and must students be directed to their choice. To that extent at least, be it noted, for let us not forget that the social subjects have a disciplinary and a deeply cultural value, comparable, some of their more enthusiastic sponsors will dare think, to that of Latin, mathematics, or pure philosophy.

The foundational study of the social sciences would include, as indicated in the table, three full-year courses in history-one each in English, American, and modern Continental

history and full-year introductory or general courses in economics, government, and sociology, together with a certain amount of general training in psychology and evolutionary ethics.

No question will arise about the functional power of history to put present social environment in proper perspective; and few will question that the general courses mentioned are primarily the best for this purpose. How much of this general foundational history can be covered in the high school and how much in the college we can not attempt to say, further than to express the opinion that the history taken below the third and fourth year of the high school, as ordinarily taught, can not be relied upon to assure even a beginning of that historical sense which these subjects when taught in college ought certainly to develop. Again what history is to be taken beyond that indicated in the general foundational group, is a question of the needs of future vocation into which we can not here enter. The essential point is that two or three general college courses in history seem to be the minimum necessary to lay the general foundations for an understanding of the traditions and institutions, whether legal, political, economic, or that vague thing we call "social," which constitute the warp of our social fabric-the statically vital principle in our social environment.

Little question will arise with regard to the title of psychology to a place in the environmental studies. We may assume that the psychology taught is modern-recognizing in some measure that the individual and society are but two sides of the same shield. Nor will there be much question with regard to ethics, inasmuch as we have prefixt it with the qualification. " evolutionary." If the old "systematic" ethics be taught, it will have to find a place among the cultural or disciplinary studies.

There remain of the foundational social sciences economics, government, and sociology. That something of all these is necessary even to a superficial acquaintance with social environment, most will grant. But as to what phases of them should be offered in this general foundational group, there is

room for diversity of opinion. Take economics for example: assuming that the student can devote to it three periods a week for a year, what, out of all the riches of his material, should the teacher present? Some instructors devote this full year to economic theory, either from personal love of that fascinating subject or from conviction that "students must be led to think" and that "there is nothing like theory for that purpose." Such teachers probably unconsciously stand on the doctrine of formal discipline. They emphasize the brainstretching function of economic study, but fail almost totally to grasp the more essential nature of their subject as a revelation of the significance of the facts and relations of our everyday economic environment. There could be no economics without economic theory. That all will grant. But of what avail is it that the student be able to state with precision the productivity theory of interest and to compare it with the exchange theory, if he is innocent of the most elementary knowledge of the actual conflict between capital and labor, or that he can work his way without fallacy thru intricate mazes of theory with regard to capital and capital goods, capitalization and "time-discount," and the "synchronizing" of production and income, if he is ignorant of the difference between common and preferred stock and knows nothing of the actual corporate organization of industry today? One trouble with pure theory devotees is that they assume on the part of the student a knowledge of the world which he does not ordinarily possess. At least this is true so far as elementary or introductory courses in economics are concerned. If the function of the college is to produce "scouts," to use Professor Pearson's term,' certainly the scout-to-be should have some training in social topography. The more knowledge of the actual lay of the land he can get before he goes into it the better. Now by far the greater part of the "scouting" to be done in the future is not military and technical scouting but economic and social. Great advances in science and technique are in store for us, undoubtedly, but the world's greatest need now is to make the advances already won more really 1 See his National life from the standpoint of science.

and uniformly effective in an enlargement and enrichment of human life. We need, both individually and collectively, to learn how to use our newly created material resources. If there is a more fundamental pair of facts in society than economic value and the economic scarcity upon which it depends we have yet to discover it. "Getting a living" may be a" sordid" matter, but after all it is the thing that takes most of our time, thought, and energy. If we can put a little intellectual curiosity, perhaps even a little romance, into it, it will be a more enjoyable process. In our more spiritual and pious moments we speak deprecatingly of the "commercialism of our age,” and of the "gross materialism of the American people ❞—with whom most of us are glad enough to associate yet it is a question whether a great proportion of us have much of an understanding or appreciation-much of a guess even concerning the real nature of this almost infinitely complex, quasi-competitive, semi-monopolistic industrial society of ours. More than that, we ordinarily have little or no realization of our place in it, or of the real meaning of our simplest economic activities. With all its frictions, misadjustments, injustices, failures, and with all its magnitude, its achievements, and its marvelous organization, the great commercio-industrial world in which we live is a thing to fire the imagination, and to stimulate the keenest scientific desire for knowledge. There is needed, to be sure, a new Herr Teufelsdröckh to spread out in panorama before our mind's eye the whole seething mass, and make us feel, if not comprehend, a little of the true inwardness of it. We need not wait for another Carlyle, however; it is within the province and the power of every college teacher of economics worthy his place to give some slight vision into the real meaning of the economic struggle, and to try to put light and human interest into this stale prose affair of earning bread and butter and filching jam to go on the butter. This means of course that the teacher of economics is going to fail of his larger opportunities if he shuts out of view the ethical phases of his subject.

The importance of the task of the instructor of economics.