THE COLLEGE IDEAL.
153
"disciplining the mind," but in the main they believe that there is no God but the Useful, and Science is his prophet. The tendency to make our education commercial, to pass over the highest and grandest manifestations of human force, merely to teach the student some little art that will make his daily bread a little more abundant, seems to me a lowering of divine wisdom to the level of dollars and cents.
Matthew Arnold has defined true instructruction as teaching a man "to know himself and to know the world." The practical educationists would have us know the world only. Lead away by the eternal question of Daily Bread, they insist that the college shall teach the youth only that which will be useful to him in earning a living. Such education is time wasted, and is less than half-education. Take one upon which many spend much time—German. Ask most students of German for what they study it, and they will say: "Because it will be useful to me; I can command higher wages if I speak German." Not one in fifty studies it for the intellectual life to be found in German literature.
The boy of twelve or fourteen years possessing average intelligence and powers of imitation will acquire a better speaking knowledge by a residence of six months in a German community than by pursuing the entire course of this college. Out of the Senior classes of '81 and '82, numbering thirty-one, of whom twenty-one studied German, I find that just one speaks that language fluently and intelligibly. Yet German is, above all, a practical study.
These seekers of useful knowledge deride the classics, but speak respectfully of sciences. Far be it from me to disparage the work that Science has done, but yet I cannot see how, as a means of culture, its value is greater or even equal to that of the humanities. Science, in its restless and far-reaching search for knowledge, has piled up a hoard of information so vast that no one man's mind can grasp it all. In science, above all things, it is necessary to specialize. Yet, what will it avail me to know the scientific names of the indigenous plants of Douglas county? Is it of more importance to me to know how many species of birds there are in Kansas, or to recognize any one of them at sight, than to know what Plato thought on the highest and greatest subjects? Is it more interesting to observe the habits of cray-fishes than to inspire my own mind by the study of the grandest manifestations of human powers and deeds? That old, and hackneyed, and worn-out line hits its after all:
' The proper study of mankind is man.'
If, then, that instruction is unwise, that teaches too early specialization; if that instruction is false, that regards material success alone, and teaches only that which will bring in daily bread; if our system of education, while good in many respects, is yet so incomplete and deficient, what is the thing required; what is the ideal of education; what is the College Ideal? One of the clearest headed, best cultured thinkers of the day, Matthew Arnold, has said: "The aim and office of instruction, say many people, is to make a man a good citizen, or a good Christian, or a gentleman; or it is to fit him to get on in the world; or is it to enable him to do his duty in that state of life to which he is called. It is none of these, and the modern spirit more and more discerns that it is none of these. These are at best secondary and indirect aims of instruction; its prime direct aim is to enable a man to know himself and the world. Such knowledge is the only sure basis for action, and this basis it is the true aim and office of instruction to supply."
But when we question what is the best instruction for this end, we find ourselves at once in the midst of the battle between humanities and sciences. To know ourselves we must know what other men have done what have been the powers and deeds of the human spirit. To this end no study is so profitable as the humanities, Altherthumswissenschaft, the science of antiquity. Whoever seeks to know himself from a knowledge of the powers and deeds of the human spirit, can nowhere find more inspiration than in the study of the achievements of Greece in literature and the arts. And from the whole ancient world the student of the human spirit may learn lessons of the highest importance. The humanists have perceived this and in its truth lies the strength of their position.