The daily gazette., 1877-10-06
OUR PROGRESS IN SUPERIOR ED.
UCATION.
rom the Baltimore Bulletin.

From the Baltimore Bulletin.
There are very few of our middle-aged
citizens who have not had occasionto ex-
press regret that they, in their youth,
were deprived of the educational advant-
ages which are open to the youth Of the
present generation. They remember,
with almost sadness, how poor and mean
their chances were in comparison with
those afforded the boys of to-day, how
scholarship and scientific culture have
advanced, and how many new studies
there are to-day, opening up a thousand
new vistas through which to peer into
the depths of the physical and intellectu-
al world,
Indeed, the rapidity of our American
growth towards manhood Is measured
more surprisingly and more accurately
by our progress in superior education, by
the additions we have made, to our
superior culture, than 1t is even by our
immense material development. This Is
contrary to the opinion commonly held,
but it is true nevertheless. Up to very
few years ago, like the youth in his pro-
gress towards manhood, our growth wss
all in limb and Drawn, and our couture"
comprised either crude and jejune inyen-
tions of our own or bald limitations of
European literature and art. We had
no scholarship to speak of. We applied
no original thought except to politics and
engineering. Our authors and poets were
all little craft, "rarl nantes in gurgite
vasto," and keeping very close to shore.
We had no literary class, no criticism,
only few sporadic clubs of lettered per-
sons, which, in our pride and poverty,we
called schools"
One hundred and twenty years ago
when Mr.. Charles Carroll and Mr.. rench
Tilghman studied law in the Temple at
London, our educated classes and clergy,
who bore but small proportion to- the
whole population still had the benefit of
foreign teachers, and there were good
classlcists amongst them. Ezra Stiles, of
Yale College, who told the Bishop of Au-
tun (such a bishopD M. Talleyrand-P Peri
CORD. visiting at New Haven, and full of
curiosity, that he had no reason to be-
lieve there was single native-born per-
son in the village who conld not read
and write-President Stiles himself was
a good Latinist, but learned his Latin
from graduate of Oxford or Cambridge.
He was taught Hebrew and Aramaic
by Timothy Cutler, probably, and Gut
Ter himself was taught in England.
But the college curriculum was and
very poor and mean for three
generations. 1t is probable that the up
per form boys of Eton hundred years
ago knew more Latin and certainly more
Greek than the best graduates of Harvard
Yale, or Columbia did forty years ago.
the great reform of American
educational systems had not begun in
1851, when Charles Astor Bristed wrote
his rather snobbish but very interesting
Fice Years in an English Uniuefsity. |
ALI of our scholars who were well taught |
were those who went outside the college |
course, or who completed their education |
in a foreign university. There were |
some hard students at Harvard, and the |
course at Jefferson's University at Char
lottesville was thorough so far as it went,
but 1t did not go far enough. Bristed
says that in 1885, when he entered Yale,
prosody was not heard of. A classical tu-
tor in the college was in doubt about the
quantity of profugus, almost the first
word in the 1Eneid. Books were taught
not subjects, and what Frederick Deni-
son Maurice said of the young men of
Athens was pertinent to our own voluble
graduates:-"The most clever and en-
Iightened youth OF Athens could talk
about all manuer of things; but knew
nothing wha ever of themselves"
A change was, however, even then in
We had grown little out
IF the stage Ct hobbledeboyhood, and,
,easing to increase in stature and spread
q breadth OF shoulders, began to have
lime to grow in brains. 1t must be ad-
nittsd that Emerson, Margaret Fuller,
Theodore Parker, and the rest of that I
concord clique, by continually babbling
bout German culture, inspired many Of