'EDUCATION formerly meant an ability to write polished Latin verse, to think in terms incomprehensible to the mob, and to feel a proper disdain for all things material; to-day it is being given the meaning of an ability to take one's part in industry, in business, and in the operation of the farm.

'The best educated man of yesterday was the most helpless, where business was concerned. He knew much about the personal habits of the trilobite, could give accurate information concerning the sources of the drama and poetry of the ancient Greeks.... But he knew less than nothing of making and selling things, while his knowledge of the farm came of memorized bits of pastoral and rustic poetry.'

As I read the illuminating and veracious newspaper article whose opening paragraphs were adorned with the above choice statements of educational truth, I regretted that this valuable contributor to journalistic literature and public information could not also behold the mental picture which the closing quotation especially brought before my own vision.

One summer day the grocer's delivery horse balked in front of our house. Of all obstreperous quadrupeds, he was the very balkiest horse that I ever saw. The delivery boy swore and wept, he petted and patted, he lashed and pulled, he exhausted every device known to delivery boys, and the beast moved not. A crowd assembled, the sort of crowd which such an attraction always draws, 'practical' men and boys all,

and, I'll dare be sworn, not a user of grammar pure and undefiled in the whole collection. And they told all they knew about balky horses, and did all they knew as well; but the horse remained unmoved. Then the college professor of our family, a Latin professor, as it chanced, and of the vintage which our valued writer on education would probably term 'of yesterday,' looked out of his library window and contemplated the situation. But not for long. He rose without remark, sought his carriage house, procured a rope, advanced to the middle of the street, spoke gently to the grocer's boy and his steed, attached the rope at the points where it would do the most good — and the animal proceeded down the street. There was some surprised and admiring comment from the bystanders, I remember, to which the professor made not much response. It is barely possible that this brilliant exhibition of what is supposed to typify 'efficiency' was the product of memorized bits of pastoral and rustic poetry'; but the only explanation which he vouchsafed to his family was, 'I learned that trick when I was a boy on Jim Henderson's farm. He used to keep the meanest horses that ever grew.'

If the sort of stuff which I have quoted as a prelude to my prospective remarks were the only specimen of it that I had ever read or heard, or if the family incident just related were the only evidence that could be offered of its preposterous absurdity, the prospective remarks could hardly be worth the

making. But, as a matter of fact, that sort of stuff is being written and said a great deal, and the multitude seems blind to the numerous facts which flatly contradict such declarations of the failure of the college-bred to 'connect with' what certain modern thinkers are pleased to term 'life.'

The article in question was written as a preliminary to a recent rather important educational conference, which I myself attended. From this outline of its purpose and general tendency one might have supposed the sole purpose of the conference to be the inauguration of a grand movement for the uplift and culture of rural communities through a general policy which the following sentence fairly well typifies: "They will, also, have pig and social clubs.'

A week later I attended another educational meeting at which the highest educational official in his state proclaimed in a long speech the gospel of 'More corn roots and no Latin roots,' and 'Down with higher mathematics,' with all else that leads to college, but 'does not prepare for practical life.' At both these meetings there were earnest, and not a few, groups of men and women engaged in the discussion of the advancement of higher education and the promotion of honest educational standards and ideals, but their meetings were accorded a brief space in obscure nooks in the daily papers, while the exponents of 'pig and social clubs' shared the front pages with Mexico, and the pictured faces of organizers of tomato clubs beamed from every local journal. And a prominent paper, commenting editorially and approvingly upon one man's suggestion 'to limit mathematics in the public schools to what the farmers, bankers, and others in commercial life need in their ordinary business,' and to 'throw the rest overboard, and have the children taught the three thousand or four thou

sand ordinary words they are likely to use,' and to have 'the fifteen thousand others more or less technical cast into the junk heap,' said of such suggestions that 'they ought to have, and we believe will have, universal approval.'

Again, one of the most highly esteemed of the magazines to which I subscribe contained recently an editorial in praise of the new style of college commencement adopted in a northwestern state, at which, with appropriate 'scientific' comment, a young woman in a becoming big apron did a family washing, a youth in butcher's raiment cut up a dead sheep, and a future broncho-buster gave an exhibition of coltbreaking, - all on the commencement stage, to the immense delight of an audience assembled in apprehension of some hours of exposition of baccalaureate plans for the regeneration of humanity. The editorial eulogy of the innovation closed as follows: 'It is always interesting to listen to a person who knows what he is talking about, whatever that may be, but the number of people who can talk well on what they do not know is naturally limited.'

Is it always interesting to listen to a person who knows what he is talking about? If that editor really imagines so, he evidently has never listened to an uninterrupted ninety-minute description of how a notable housekeeper makes strawberry preserves. And I would defy any human being to prove that she does not know what she is talking about, for I have tested her preserves too often. But her recital of her methods does not inspire an appetite for more.

Among the oft-quoted adages is one that 'there cannot be so much smoke without some fire.' But I have had occasion in my life to observe the fallibility of proverbs. And all of us have seen, if I mistake not, dense clouds of

moral smoke where there was no real fire at all, or, if there was, it did not originate from the victim's own chimney. And so it is my opinion that the murky fumes now obscuring from clear view the real work of the college and collegian rise from no fire of collegiate kindling. Less metaphorically, I do not be lieve that it is from any real failure of the college or its product to make good' that the present attack upon it has arisen. It is rather the instinctive desire of a multitude of half-educated men and women to justify their own unlettered state by proclaiming a new cultural salvation, easily attained and 'just as good' as the old kind that came with tears and midnight oil. Their mode of proving it just as good and a good deal better, is to select a few cases of failures in life, group them advantageously for public view, and announce, 'College education did this.' I heard an enthusiastic propagator of the 'new education' for women distinctly charge it to the college women of her state that there were hundreds and even thousands of unhappy women in the city of Atlanta who did not know how to sweep a floor properly.

'You college women are neglecting the vital things of life, my dears,' she said, in an affecting peroration. And from recent reading of the daily papers I cull two flowers of thought, one from an educator of some prominence, the other from a trashy story running serially on the 'Women and Society' page. The educator, speaking on vocational training, 'showed by figures and several illustrations that there are many whose life work is not in harmony with their talents,' according to the newspaper's report. "There is no higher work, the speaker said, than to lead a child into those fields of activities which will make satisfied men and women. He is of the opinion that the focusing of attention by schools on the

professions is doing great harm to the country.'

The speakers in the second extract are two disillusioned female college graduates. ""It often seems to me, said Marian reflectively, "that going to college unfits a girl for contact with the real world more than anything else could possibly do. A college campus has a way of building ideals that are almost certain to get knocked into a cocked hat.' cocked hat." "I agree with you," sighed Miss Barton; "the bumps that come after a girl's graduation hurt all the more because college has made her a highly sensitive being. . . . Believe me, the truly happy and contented people are the lowbrows and the roughnecks, if you will allow me to use two very expressive terms."

I should apologize for seeming to take seriously this bit of profound philosophy if it did not fairly represent much that is constantly appearing, expressed with hardly less crudeness, in far more aristocratic literary environment. Many of the mishaps of this story's peculiarly idiotic heroine are traced to the fact that 'she left college with no training to do any particular work'; and the thing is significant from just this: that the author tosses the statement off glibly from time to time for a truth accepted as proved by modern society. It would be possible, I dare say, to brand the statement 'not proved' by the popular statistical method, that is, by tabulated lists of male college graduates who have become presidents of the United States and others in authority, and of female college graduates who have achieved an average of over two and a half children each. But that method does not appeal to me, because I consider the truth thus vindicated, however indubitable, about the least important argument in the case for the college. I am inclined rather to hark back to the words of a certain

Augustan poet whose cheerful wisdom and plain, hard sense make it seem to me a thousand pities that all the tomato-canners and pig-club officials should go down to old age in total innocence of his philosophy and even of his existence. For I am sure that they, and their immediate educational advisers as well, if they knew a few of the things he said and did, and if they did not know that they were said in Latin and done in Rome or thereabouts, would class him among the 'efficient.' (Although it might perhaps disagree with them to discover that he animadverted severely upon the teaching of mathematics in Roman schools, merely to supply 'what the farmers, bankers, and others in commercial life need in their ordinary business'; for when once this gangrene of care for money' has eaten into the soul, he said, how can we expect great literature, and its natural accompaniment, great ideals of citizenship, ever to find birth there?) But, although about as hard-headed and practical as a poet ever gets to be, he wrote these words, which I suspect that it does take something rather beyond the pigclub intelligence to recognize as practicality in its essence:

'You see with what effort of mind and soul you strive to avoid what you believe to be the greatest evils, a small fortune and humiliating defeat at the polls. Will you not learn from and listen to and believe a wiser teacher, so that you will not care for the things which you foolishly admire and wish for?'

The college seems to me to-day's 'wiser teacher'; not an agency to train undeveloped boys and girls for some particular money-making vocation before they yet know their own tastes or powers, but to give them a sufficient apprehension of life's true values to judge fairly what things are perhaps worth the bruises and weariness of pur

suit 'over seas, over rocks, and through fire.' Even if it were true that college graduates are not making money, moving great enterprises, - 'doing things,' in short, it would still be true that they have the best equipment for the many-sidedness of real life which the world has yet learned to compress into the few early years allotted to schoolroom preparation for living. It is absurd to expect full preparation for any of its walks or vicissitudes from those few years, however spent; but those who have spent them in college contain the smallest proportion 'whose life work is not in harmony with their talents,' and they come nearer than any others to holding the specific for being 'truly happy and contented people.' In the last analysis the whole question comes down to this: What do we mean when we talk about 'life' and about things that are 'vital'? It appears that perhaps those who sling these terms with the greatest freedom and frequency disagree with me entirely as to their meaning. It is then a not unimportant matter to decide whether the thing that is 'vital' to you is your stewed-or stuffed, or escalloped tomato, or your state of mind, which stays with you a good deal longer than the tomato stays on your plate or the memory of its flavor stays in your grateful soul, — even if you fletcherize. In short, is the only 'vital' thing to you the making and possession of some things that you can eat up, and wear out, and smash? I know that eloquent and impassioned articles have been written to prove that the whole happiness of mankind is balanced upon the delicate fulcrum of digestion, that one lurking disease-germ in a carpet that knows not the vacuum cleaner can destroy whole cities — and who denies it? But can any one with brains in his head and even a rudimentary tendency toward fair-mindedness also deny that it is possible for life to

be perfectly miserable to many a consumer of a scientifically chosen and cooked dinner, eaten with feet resting upon a floor swept and garnished with all the ceremonials of domestic-science propriety? I make no claim that the college graduate can by exalted thought stay the ravages of the typhoid germ or neutralize the pangs of indigestion; but I hereby protest that he has largely escaped the one-sided mental development which sees 'life' only in food and sanitation, and the various material elements which they represent.

One of the greatest absurdities of the whole attack upon college training is the constant assumption that its finished product has been immured somewhere all his school-life long, whereby he has been absolutely cut off from contact with everything but books, and those books leading solely to the learned professions. Not every boy now serves an apprenticeship in equine and bovine management on some relative's farm; but even in these days it is the very exceptional boy or girl who does not daily come into contact with all manner of details of what we are pleased to term 'practical' life. And in the college preparatory school, and still more in college, there are numerous forms of 'student activities,' theoretically distinct from, but always growing out of the school curriculum, which develop and train executive ability in matters of business and industry, if we think special training in those things so tremendously important. The college The college graduate does not, and never did, in this country at least, come down from the commencement platform a spectacled dyspeptic, who has a 'proper disdain for all things material,' and is 'helpless where business is concerned.' Who has it been to any really great extent but the college graduates who have made all the western states rank high at once for their educational stan

dards and for their business, agriculture, and industry? And, be it remembered, they were graduates of a day when colleges were much more narrowly classical than now. Again, it is of no little significance that the form of social work generally admitted to have come nearer to a solution of the hard problem of urban poverty, ignorance, and vice than any other, is for the most part prosecuted under the name of the College Settlement Association. Even in the cities where settlement work does not actually bear the college name, it is still largely directed by collegebred women and men, with collegebred ideals. I reverse the common form of expression, and name the women first, because I believe that it is universally admitted that this great work is essentially woman-devised and woman-executed, although it has had the valuable coöperation of many thoughtful and educated men. But I also believe, what is not so generally recognized,—that it is only the gradually diffused effect of college training upon the American female mind which has ever made women think that they can do such great things as these, no matter though some of the actual workers are not themselves holders of collegiate degrees. Higher education has been so nearly the sole agency in the awakening of women to a consciousness of their powers and their duties that it fills me with amazement and consternation to see the strength of the present movement to imprison their mental activities within a narrow technical training which boasts that its highest aim is the intensive application of that training 'in the home.'

The President of the National Women's Trade Union League of America wrote to me last spring, 'We are especially grateful to you, because the newer education... which is being given to boys is being denied to girls on the