speeches to the wolves, for instance, in order to turn them into dogs. But the greatest success will befall him who wants to educate neither all nor limited circles, but one individual, and who glances either to the right nor to the left. The last century excelled ours in that it possessed so many individually educated persons, and as many educators, wlio had made this their life-task— and who, with it, had found dignity both in their own eyes and in those of the remaining "good society."
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The so-called classical education.—We have discovered that our life is consecrated to knowledge, that we should throw it away, nay, that we should have thrown it away, if this consecration did not protect us against our own selves; while we frequently, and not without deep emotion, recite the verse:
"Oh fate, I follow thee! For would I not,
'Spite many a sigh, I must comply."
And then, in looking backwards on the course of life, we also discover that one thing cannot be restored: the wasted years of our youth, when our educators did not employ those ardent, eager years, full of a glowing thirst for knowledge, to lend us to the knowledge of things, but to the so-called classical education! Think of the waste of our youth, when a scanty knowledge of the Greeks and Romans and their languages was clumsily
