Page:Essays on the Higher Education.djvu/92

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76
THE HIGHER EDUCATION

belief that it was answering the question wisely. But now the New Education, as brought to our notice afresh by Professor Palmer's article in the November number of this Review, claims to have made beyond doubt the discovery that the answer hitherto practically given must be almost completely reversed. The language used by the article alluded to is not a bit too strong to express the completeness of the proposed reversal, The New Education has avowedly thrown away an "established principle;" has organized a college "from the top almost to the bottom on a wholly different plan;" has wrought "a revolution like that in the England of Victoria."

It would be an error to suppose, however, that even so revolutionary a change in education should be denied fair consideration, on the ground that what seems to contradict a well-nigh universal experience cannot, of course, be wise and true. If the New Education should finally come to have matters according to its liking in all our educational institutions, such a change of custom would not be wholly without a parallel in the history of the subject. It would perhaps not be greater than the change which took place in the culture of Greek youth when the Sophists captivated them all by adding rhetoric and dialectic to the ancient disciplines of music, mathematics, and gymnastics. Nor can it be wholly forgotten that the ancient