tation of novelties so common in our modern schools.[1] "There is too much agitation, unceasing change, and consequent uncertainty in the operations of our American schools. There is too much individualism in laying plans and arranging courses and in methods of teaching, too burning a desire to say something new or to do something novel for the sake of prominence in the teaching body. Of course it will be said that this has brought us where we are. But we might be quite as well off if we were not exactly where we are."[2]
Within the last month (October 1902) severe strictures were made on some of the very latest educational "improvements," and that not by Jesuits, nor by professional philologians, who stubbornly defend their long-cherished classics, but by such as may eminently be called men of affairs. The Electrical World spoke of President Eliot's efforts to lift the American college to the plane of a foreign university. "The chief effect has been to push the college into the existing dilemma. It is crowded from above by the necessity for more time in the professional schools, and for a nether millstone it finds the secondary school that its own hands have fashioned. And truth to tell, the college is losing heart. It has virtually surrendered its last year to professional electives, but the sacrifice has not served its purpose. The latest suggestion from no less eminent a source than that of Professor Butler, of Columbia, is
- ↑ "In America we are unfortunately too prone to view with favor any new idea, educational or other, and to embark precipitately in experiments which involve serious consequences." Professor Bennett of Cornell University, in The Teaching of Latin in the Secondary School, p. 80.
- ↑ President Draper of the University of Illinois. Educational Review, May 1902, p. 457.
