contact with nature and science, with art and literature; we shape our towns and our time, and all that is common to every one, – to the banker and the manufacturer, to the minister and the teacher, to the lawyer and the physician. The technique of our profession, then, appears only as a small variation of the large background of work in which we all share; and if the education must be adapted to our later life, all these problems demand a uniform education for the members of the same social community. The division of labor lies on the outside. We are specialists in our handiwork, but our heart work is uniform, and the demand for individual education emphasizes the small differences in our tasks, and ignores the great similarities. And, after all, who is able to say what a boy of twelve years will need for his special life work? It is easily said in a school programme that the course will be adapted to the needs of the particular pupil with respect to his later life, but it would be harder to say how we are to find out what the boy does need; and even if we know it, the straight line to the goal is not always the shortest way."
Mr. Clement L. Smith is not less outspoken on this topic[1]: "An education which aims to equip men for particular callings, or to give them a special training for entering upon those callings, however useful it may be, is not the liberal education which should be the single aim of the college. It should be the aim of the secondary school, too, – if not for all pupils, certainly for those who are going to college. For those who turn away, at the end of the school course, to
- ↑ "The American College in the 20th Century," Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1900.
