Though all this seems to be the comprehensive truth for nine tenths of all the people, I yet am constrained to believe that for the remaining one tenth, and that the upper, has occurred no corresponding advantage. The best part of any community of any age or stage of progress can usually be left to care for its own interests. The best boys and girls in a class can, in most instances, be left to their own destinies. They take care of themselves; their strength, their enthusiasm will not lead them far astray. The same discrimination, in some respects, may be made likewise in regard to the change in the value of the higher education. The best men in the college class of a generation or more ago were well educated. They had less knowledge than the best men of to-day at graduation, but they had clearer power of thinking. They may have had less discrimination, less variety of knowledge, less appreciation of æsthetic values in literature, but they certainly had as great intellectual weight and force. Their intellectual forces, some would say, were indeed greater. The ordinary men of the college class have, like the best men, a wider intellectual outlook than had their fathers, but it is to be added that their intellectual power has not increased. They do have greater culture, but they may not have greater intellectual weight. The reason for this failure, if failure it be, lies in the greater diversity of interests which college life has taken on and also in the greater independence of the student. He is left free not to study, if not to study be his will. It is interesting to find that a not dissimilar interpretation may be made regarding the American public school teacher. I doubt whether the best teachers of to-day are abler or more efficient than were the best teachers of a generation ago. Best teachers have always been great personalities. Personality is the chief element in teaching as in all work. But the rank and file of the staff has improved through fuller knowledge and more constant use of improved methods of teaching. The normal school has given efficiency to a large body of teachers. It may be added that these changes or this lack of changes in the educational process of forty years, are not unlike the changes which have occurred among the people of the world. The best people of a generation ago are like the best people of the present day, but the great body of the people of the two periods is unlike. A distinct lifting of the community has taken place. The average order of ability and of attainment has become higher. The single mountain peaks or ranges may be no higher, but the plateau has been raised. The ocean level of humanity has lifted. The age of the people has come and is yet to come in a greater fullness. Of this elevation, improved education is in part the result, but of it also improved education is more distinctly the cause. |