education in the high school. It does not mean that he recedes from the belief that our education must have a moral as well as an intellectual basis and that it must be thorough and stable. It means rather that when we examiners dictate the particular kind of knowledge which shall constitute an education, and when we fix quantities and methods, we are not only exceeding our usefulness but doing positive harm.

We may, I believe, fairly insist that preparatory study should concern itself chiefly with the four old and tried disciplines: language, mathematics, science and history; that excellence shall be attained in one or more or in all of these groups. But when we begin to prescribe or specify more in detail we are entering upon debatable ground.

When entrance requirements depart from actual prerequisites, and among these I place those qualities which make for success in college and later,-they are exceeding their natural function. Moreover, they are defeating their purpose, for, emphasis upon particular subjects of study, if these be not essential prerequisites, endangers scholarship standards by limiting the number of candidates among whom selection may be made.

One of the subjects which best illustrates the conflict between liberals and conservatives and between the interests of the private fitting school and the public high school, is Latin, and this subject has, in most colleges, been the chief barrier to the operation of what might be called the comprehensive principle of selection. We all esteem the Latin examiner who insists that the torch of learning must be carried forward, but the college which refuses admission to a candidate who has had less than four years of Latin will not reach many high school boys even by the use of the Comprehensive papers. All roads no longer lead either to or from Rome. The study of Latin has come to depend largely upon the accident of birth and the educational and social consequences of such a restriction of choice cannot be overlooked with impunity. I have no illusions connected with the magic term "democracy." I am pleading rather for the principle that our entrance requirements should recognize and encourage an aristocracy of achievement. They should contain a hidden "grandfather clause." No better training nor wiser guidance can be found than that given in our large private schools, but it is

obvious that these are only for those who have been wise in their choice of fathers or grandfathers.

Accordingly, a principle of selection which limits the choice of subjects as rigidly as of old is out of harmony with that upon which the Comprehensive examinations are based. We may be liberals as to subjects of study and at the same time radicals as to scholarship, but we cannot be conservative as to subjects of study without making sacrifices of scholarship.

The success of the Comprehensive examinations will depend, then, upon the latitude permitted as to matter and method and the rigidity insisted upon as to achievement. This will permit the high school to adapt itself to its environment and to solve its own special problems without losing touch with the college to which it may look for standards and inspiration. It will, moreover, not embarrass the special fitting school, for this, with its complete control of the boy's time and interests, can meet these requirements as easily as the old, with benefit to itself and to the college.

The New Plan examinations may not have all the virtues ascribed to them, nor will they remedy all the faults ascribed to the older plan. They are, however, founded upon a sound principle, and if they bring the New England colleges into closer touch with the public school system, and thus into closer touch with the social and educational fabric of the country, much will have been accomplished for education.

The Doctrine of General Discipline

BY PROFESSOR ERNEST C. MOORE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

Y

OUR secretary's invitation to me to take part in this discussion began like this: "There seems to be in some quarters a feeling that the attack upon Formal Discipline has failed. We know better but it is necessary to keep reiterating the truth. Will you not speak on the Doctrine of General Discipline" at the approaching meeting of the N. E. Association of Colleges and secondary schools? I have for at least fifteen years spoken in season and out of season on this subject and have never failed to accept an invitation to discuss it. It is one of two or three subjects for which I feel a missionary's responsibility and so burning a zeal that I mean in the future as in the past never to fail when an opportunity is presented to preach this gospel-for sound doctrine as to the function and effect of studies is the very heart of all that teachers do or can do. It has been said that "the problem of mental discipline, of determining under what conditions, by what methods and to what extent training received in a given line of mental activity spreads to other lines of mental activity is acknowledged to be the central problem of educational psychology ("Whipple, in the preface to Rugg's The Experimental Determination of Mental Discipline in School Studies"). It is more than that, it is the central problem of educational philosophy as well, and the attitude which we who teach take upon this problem determines as nothing else does what we put into courses of study and how we teach that which we attempt to teach. Until we can get our bearings on this subject we simply cannot get our educational bearings at all.

The doctrine of formal or general education is a heritage from the past; it is a theory concerning the value of studies which has a history but not by any means as long or as compelling a history as we are sometimes told that it has. When palaeolithic man invented stone implements he doubtless taught his children how

to make and use them, when he invented the bow and arrow he taught his children how to shoot with them. Whatever training he gave was specific and all education was frankly and clearly specific until the sophists came and taught that if one wanted to be a physician he should study rhetoric or if he wanted to be a general he should learn to make speeches. They brought in confusion; but Socrates cleared it up by perpetually insisting that one must learn "human and public virtue" or excellence, in the same way that he learned to build houses or make shoes. This too was the view of Plato throughout whose works insistence that education is specific is as marked as it was in the discussions of Socrates. But in the Republic Plato uses a sentence or two about the study of arithmetic and geometry stirring the mind to greater keenness which led some men who read his dialogues to say that when we study arithmetic and geometry we do not merely learn to think arithmetically or geometrically but we improve our minds throughout. Plato takes pains to show that that is not his meaning for in the same connection he says that students must go on from mathematics to dialectic, for "I have hardly ever known a mathematician who could reason." There is no evidence whatever that Aristotle believed in anything but specific education. The next mention we have of the doctrine is in Quintilian where it is stated only to be dismissed. This is the passage: "As to Geometry, people admit that some attention to it is of advantage in tender years for they allow that the thinking powers are excited and the intellect sharpened by it and that a quickness of perception is thence produced; but they fancy that it is not like other sciences profitable after it has been acquired but only whilst it is being studied." Then Quintilian goes on to point out that it is to be studied for certain specific kinds of profit after it has been acquired.

As nearly as I can discover everything which was taught during the dark ages, the lesser renaissance, the greater renaissance and the period of the German reformation was taught and studied under the conviction that it was specifically useful. The contrary doctrine that studies are to be pursued not for their specific values but because they improve the mind has sometimes been wished upon John Locke. And there are some passages in his writings which seem to justify this interpretation but there is one passage in

which he clearly and definitely repudiates it. "I hear it said that children should be employed in getting things by heart to exercise and improve their memories. I could wish this were said with as much authority of reason as with forwardness of assurance and that this practice were established upon good observation more than old custom. For it is evident that strength of memory is owing to a happy constitution and not to any habitual improvement got by exercise."

Some years ago at Yale University one of my students; Dr. Eby, took for the subject of his doctor's thesis a study of educational practice in Germany in the 18th century. That thesis has not been published but is on file in the Yale library. In it he shows quite conclusively that in Germany about the middle of the 18th century the teachers of the classics began first in one place then in another and finally pretty generally to defend their teaching of Latin and Greek against the attacks which the realists were making upon them by saying that the study of the classics does more than give a knowledge of the classics, that they discipline, improve and perfect the mental faculties of the students who pursue them. Thus twenty-three hundred years after Plato made his chance remark about the study of arithmetic and geometry making the mind of the student keener, which he took pains to explain does not mean that a mathematician can think, this view of the function of studies which was not anywhere accepted by teachers or students until the earlier reasons for studying the classics had lost their force, became the operative philosophy of education throughout the west. The beginnings of faculty education synchronize with the development of faculty psychology. As long as psychologists taught that the truest view of the mind was that it was made up of faculties, the observation, the imagination, the memory, the reason, the emotions and the will it was inevitable that schoolmasters should devote themselves to developing and perfecting these faculties. But the faculty psychology was destroyed by the critical studies of Herbart A nearly 100 years ago, yet perhaps as many as 80% of the teachers of today and very nearly one hundred per cent. of present day parents still hold to the theory of faculty training as firmly as though the faculty psychology had not been abandoned.

There seem to have been critics of this educational doctrine