The daily morning journal and courier. [volume] (New Haven, Conn.) 1894-1907, 1904-10-06
EDUCATION TOO EASY.
AMERICAN BOY HAS NO STUN
BLING BLOCKS.
EngIishman Says the Yankees Have a
Tendency to Attempt to Construct
Royal Road to Learning.

Royal Road to Learning.
"The basic defect in the American
system Of education seems to me to be
that the American teacher does the
thinking for the American pupil"
This comment came recently from
graduate of an English university, who,
during ten years of. successful expert
enee as a teacher and tutor in different
parts of the United States, has diyest-
ed himself pretty thoroughly of insular
prejudices and acquired a sincere adj
nliration for many things American
1t was made in answer to the query
why the boy of fourteen at the English
public school or the German gymnasium
usually had a more thorough knowledge
of Latin and mathematics than the ay-
erage freshman in the colleges Of this
country. .---..-.-s
my eyes were opened" he continued,
"by one of the first pupils had in this
country. He seemed to know algebra,
geometry, trigomometry and calculus.
But he did not. need not go into de-
tails. He was one of the boys who ac-
cepts the tables of logarithms as a sort
OF revealed mathematical religion. He
had every rule and demonstration as
pat as prize parrot. He had been
through all those studies and was ire
mendously puzzled about how he could
seem to know so much about those
branches of knowledge while his mind
displayed not an iota of the develop
ment that inevitably follows their mas
terry.
II was not entirely dazed, however,
until I examined the text book from
which he had learned calculus. 1t was
q little volume, but all of calculus was
there seemingly. I felt myself an old
fogy. My age had passed me by re-
called my many months of stubborn
wrestling with that study, and all the
successive obstacles / had struggled
over. Yet there before me was all made
so smooth and plain and easy that any
fairly bright boy should be able to gal
Top through it to a successful examina-
tion in sixty days. I.still consider that
text book a work of genius. 1t is the
only term to apply to the work of a
man who can so putty up and glaze
over yer every rough place as to make
the rockiest path to knowledge look like
q stretch Of intellectual asphalt. But ]
still believe also that no boy ever
walked over that smoothed roadbed to
any intellectual goal, unless his bent OF
mind was such that he could not be
content till he had stripped off the de-
ceptive covering and hammered every
stumbling block out of his own way.
Don't think am assailing all Amer
lean textbooks. And, above all, don't
mistake my meaning to be an attack
upon American teachers. No ADLER man
or more admirable scholars are to be
found anywhere than in the faculties o
American colleges and universities /
am merely illustrating tendency
which / believe to be harmful one, to
attempt the impossible construction OF
royal road to learning. 1t is charac.
teffstie- of the unitarian civilization OF
present-day America. 1t saves time
but 1t does not give the student the
power to reason and originate. In 9TH
er words, see on all sides an effort to
make education easy. And education
made easy does not educate.
There are two sides to the question
naturally. The mechanical equipment
of the American schoolroom-the relief
maps the botanical and geological spec
linens, the accurately drawn and col
ored plates and all the improvements
and facilities added in recent years tc
every classroom, from kindergarten tc
laboratory-wi arouse in every parent
a feeling that is part admiration and
part regret, as the memory is recalled OF
other school days when there were nc
such enticing aids to make the days Of
Flooding less arduous. But IL such ex-
cellent assistants are to be misused and
made agents of 'get-wise-quick' fall
lacy it is time to call a halt. Unques-
tionably such misuse is made when a
teacher setting problem that involves
q sphere and two chords. takes from his
desk a glass ball pierced at different
points and draws two wires through il
at the proper angles. The pupil who
cannot draw with compasses a line upon
his paper plane that In his minds eye
is a perfect globe will be harmed, not
helped, by all the glass globes ever
blown.
1.-THE pony is the worst possible
mount for the youthful traveller toward
the mountain tops of knowledge. Nc
human being ever learned Latin OF
Greek from an interlinear. But no un-
biased observer can be blind to the fact
that the impatient American spirit, de-
sirous of concrete results in return for
the least possible expenditure of time
and toll, is apparent in matters educa-
tional as in those Industrial. The warm
ing Of the great English chemist, Sir
William Ramsay in his address to the
Society of Chemical Industry in this
city Thursday evening is timely, for
his words apply universally and not
only to his own professions:
The education of chemist must be
conceived in the sense that 1t consists
in an effort to produce an attitude OF
mind rather than to instilI definite
knowledge In short it is the inventive
faculty which must be cultivated. My
contention is that most of the lads who
enter chemical laboratory are able tc
receive some inspiration or to have a
latent inspiration developed, which will
fit them to become inventive chemists
"'Aboye all, not too much teaching
The essence of scientific progress is the
well-worn method of trial and failure
1t is simply horrible to think Of the
travesty of teaching in vogue In some
of our colleges, where everything is pro-
vided, and where the students add one