that it will do for him what it did for me if he will go at it with a determination to do it well.
I once heard a practical man, one of the leading engineers of the country in fact, and a man trained at a well-known technical school in New England, make the statement that if he were given the privilege of going to school or college again he would never elect anything that was considered practical. What he really meant, he explained, was that as he saw education it is not for immediate and practical use so much as for training and discipline of the mind, for the development of ideals, for the setting of standards. High school is not so much to give a boy specific information as it is so to prepare him to get that information for himself if he ever needs it, and needing it that he may have a brain sufhiciently well trained intelligently to use the information when he gets it.
Of course it would be quite unwise and even untrue to assert that the practical things one finds in a high school course do not in a measure conduce to discipline and training of the mind. Many of them are both practical and disciplinary, but as a rule the so-called practical subjects that are more and more creeping into the high school course and that make the strongest appeal to the boy and quite as often to his parents, have little disciplinary value, have less cultural value, and are seldom used practically after the boy leaves high school. The boy who is fed-up on these subjects often has a hard
