We need waste little time nowadays, I submit, in disposing of Encyclopaedic conceptions of College Education, conceptions that played a part in almost all educational schemes—Bentham's stupendous Chrestomathia is the fearful example—before the middle nineteenth century. We are all agreed in theory, at any rate, that to know one subject or group of subjects exhaustively is far better than a universal smattering, that the ideal of education is more particularly "all about something" with "something about everything" in a very subordinate place. The fact remains that the normal curriculum of our higher schools and colleges is a pointless non-educational miscellany, and the average graduate in Arts knows something, but not enough, of science, mathematics, Latin, Greek, literature, and history; he has paid tribute to several conflicting schemes of education, and is a credit to none. We have to get rid of this state of affairs, and we have to provide (i) a substantial mental training which shall lead at last to a broad and comprehensive view of things, and which shall be a training in generalization, abstraction, and the examination of evidence, stimulating and disciplining the imagination and developing the habit of patient, sustained, enterprising and thorough work, and (ii) we have to add a general culture, a circle of ideas about moral, aesthetic, and social matters that shall form a common basis for the social and intellectual life of the community. The former of these two elements must at some stage develop—after two or five or seven or some such period of years, which may be different in different cases—into the special training for the definite function of the individual in the social body, whether as engineer, business manager, doctor, priest, journalist, public administrator, professional soldier, or what not. And before we ask what must constitute (i) it may be well to define the relation between the first and the second section of the College stage of education.
It is (i) that will constitute the essential work of the College, which will be the especial concern of the Professorial staff, which will "count" in examinations, and I conceive it as occupying typically four full working days in the week, four good, hard-driving days, and no more, of the students' time. The remaining three, so far as they are not engaged by physical exercise, military training, and mere amusement, must be given to (ii), which I imagine an altogether more general, discursive, various, and spontaneous series of activities. To put the thing briefly, with the use of a convenient slang word (i), is "grind," and (ii) is general culture, elements that are altogether too greatly confused in adolescent education. A large number of people will consider it right and proper that (ii) on the seventh day of the week should become devotional exercise or religious thought and discussion. I would submit that under (ii) there should be formally recognized certain extremely valuable educational influences that are at present too often regarded as irregular or improper invasions of school and college work, the collegiate debating society, for example, private reading, experimental science outside the curriculum, and essays in various arts. It should be possible to provide a certain definite number of hours weekly in which the student should be required merely to show that he was doing something of a developmental kind, he would have his choice between the Library—every College ought to have a good and not too priggishly conceived Library, in which he might either read or write—or the music master, the debating society, the museum, the art studio, the dramatic society, or any concern of the sort that the College authorities had satisfactory reason for supposing to be alive and efficient. In addition (ii) should include certain minor but necessary studies not included in (i), but pursued for all that with a certain insistence, taught or directed, and controlled perhaps by examinations. If, for example, the acquisition of a foreign language was a part of the preliminary schooling, it could be kept alive by a more fastidious study in the higher grade. For the making of the good, all-round, average citizen (i) will be the essential educational factor, but for the boy or girl with a dash of genius (ii) will rise from the level of culture to that of a great opportunity.
What subject or group of subjects is to constitute (i)? There are at least three, and quite probably beyond the very limited range of my knowledge there are other, arrangements of studies that can be contrived to supply this essential substantial part of the College course. Each suffices completely, and I would hesitate to express any preference for one or the other. Each has its special direction towards certain sorts of adult function, and for that reason it may be suggested that the secondary education of an English-speaking country might very well afford all three (or more) types of secondary course. The small schools might specialize upon the type locally most desirable, the larger might group its triplicate (or quadruplicate) system of sustained and serious courses about a common Library and the common arrangements for Section ii. of the College scheme.
The first of these possible College courses, and the one most likely to be useful and fruitful for the mass of the male population in a modern community, is an expansion of the Physics of the Schooling stage. It may be very conveniently spoken of as the Natural Philosophy, course. Its backbone will be an interlocking arrangement of Mathematics, Physics, and the principles of Chemistry, and it will take up as illustrative and mind-expanding exercises, Astronomy, Geography, and Geology conceived as a general history of the Earth. Holding the whole together will be the theory of the Conservation of Energy in its countless aspects and a speculative discussion of the constitution of matter. A certain minimum of Historical and Political reading and of general "Library" would be insisted upon in Section ii. This could be made a quite noble and spacious course of instruction extending over from three to five years, from fourteen or fifteen up to eighteen or twenty-one (or even longer in the case of those partially employed); its less successful products would drop out—it might be before completion—to take up the work of more or less skilled artisans and technical workers, and its more successful ones would pass some of them into the technical colleges for special industries with a view to business direction, into special study for the engineering trades, for the profession of soldiering,[41] or for the naval and mercantile services, or into research and the literature of science. Some also would pass on to study for the profession of medicine through more special work in Chemistry and Physiology, and some with a proclivity for drawing and design would become architects, designers of appliances, and the like. The idea of the ordinary development of this course is not so very remote from what already exists in Great Britain as the Organized Science School, but, as with all these courses, it would be done in varying degrees of thoroughness and extension under varying conditions. This is the first of my three alternative College courses.
The second course will probably seem less acceptable to many readers, but all who are qualified to speak will testify to its enormous educational value. It is what one may speak of as the Biological Course. Just as the conception of Energy will be the central idea of the Natural Philosophy course, so the conception of Organic Evolution will be the central idea of the Biological Course. A general review of the whole field of Biology—not only of the Natural History of the present but of the geological record—in relation to the known laws and the various main theories of the evolutionary process will be taken, and in addition some special department, either the Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrata chiefly, or of the plants chiefly, or of several Invertebrated groups chiefly, will be exhaustively worked out in relation to these speculations. The first of these alternatives is not only probably the most invigorating mental exercise of the three but bears also more directly upon the practical concerns of life. Physiology will be taken up in relation to this special exhaustive study, and the "Elementary Physics of the Schooling" stage will be prolonged up into a treatment of Chemistry with especial reference to biological problems. Through such a course as this students might pass to the study of medicine just as well as through Natural Philosophy, and the medical profession would profit by the clash of the two types of student. The biological course, with its insistence upon heredity and physiological facts, would also give the very best and gravest preparation in the world for the practical concerns of motherhood. From it students would pass on illuminated to the study of psychology, philosophical science, and educational method. The training in the discussion of broad generalization, and much of the fact involved, would be a most excellent preliminary to special theological study and also to the advanced study of economics and political science. From this course also artists of various sorts would escape through the avenue of Section ii. which, by the by, would have to involve Historical Reading. So much for my second suggested College course.
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I may perhaps explain that my conception of military organization is a universal service of citizens —non-professional soldiers—who will be trained—possibly in boyhood and youth, to shoot very well indeed, to ride either horses or bicycles, and to take up positions and move quickly and easily in organized bodies, and, in addition, a special graduated profession of soldiers who will be in their various ranks engineers, gunners, special-force men of various sorts, and, in the higher ranks, masters of all the organization and methods necessary for the rapid and effective utilization of the non-professional manhood of the country, of volunteers, militia, or short-service enlistment levies, drawn from this general supply, and of all the machinery of communication, provisioning, and so forth. They will not be necessarily the "social superiors" of their commands, but they will naturally exercise the same authoritative command in warfare that a doctor does in a sick-room.