What are the claims of music as a means of educating the young? To some educational administrators it seems to have almost no justification. “What can be accomplished by it?” they ask. “Singing is not necessary as a factor in life.” “Music is of little importance in a work-a-day world.” So argue the school men who want “results” as they call them. But the real object of education should be first to make human beings capable of hearing and seeing intelligently, and of using their hands skillfully, and then to train the mind so that it can receive and assimilate knowledge and turn it into wisdom. There are a few school authorities who see music as an important part of such education, but most of them--being in themselves unconscious of its power and of its value--only accept it because other people similarly placed have done so, or as a relief from other studies, or as a means of enlivening public school exhibitions. That there is something in our natures which music fulfills and satisfies; that great men have given expression to their ideas through it; that the understanding and appreciation of their utterances depends on the training of the ear and of the imagination, and that, when this training has been completed, a man or woman has access to a whole world of beauty--all this the average school man does not see. Nor can he be expected to see it, for he has never experienced it in himself. But he should be convinced by the phenomena; by the large number of people who derive enjoyment and stimulation from great music; by the persistence of the love for it; even, perhaps, by the colossal sums spent on it. But he cannot dispel his distrust of a study whose results are illusive; he often sees it badly administered, and is unable to remedy the condition, so he leaves it to its fate. The one medium of human expression that is universal, that transcends language, that knows no distinctions save such as it seeks out itself in our own souls; that speaks to the tiniest child and to his grandfather in common terms; that does _not_ deal in beliefs, or in dogma, or in events, or things, or persons, or localities--this he suspects! Put all this on his educational scales; a few lessons in arithmetic will outweigh it. The passion for categorical facts, arranged in methodical sequence term by term, year by year, and culminating in a sky-rocket burst, every fact blazing up separately for an instant as though it really were alive, and then going out while the charred embers fall far apart on a patient earth--this is called Education! But this passion is almost ineradicable--is, indeed, one of the most common of human failings. It is what is called in these days “efficiency”: that is, a sort of nose-on-the-grindstone persistency in detail entirely oblivious of those larger aspects of any case which really decide its destiny. Systems, categories, precedents; these are safe. Why wander from beaten paths? Individual aspiration, a desire for