Scientific Culture, and Other Essays: Second Edition; with AdditionsCooke, Josiah P., Jr. (Josiah Parsons)
Science
Scientific Culture, and Other Essays: Second Edition; with Additions
Cooke, Josiah P., Jr. (Josiah Parsons)
Science
Not only is the apparatus required for
the new culture far more expensive than that of an ordinary classical
school, but also more personal attention must be given to each scholar,
and the ordinary labor-saving methods of the class-room are wholly
inapplicable. In the face of such obstacles as these conditions present,
the new culture can advance only very gradually; and, amid the rivalry
of the old system, it can only succeed by maintaining a very high degree
of efficiency. The new way will certainly not offer any easier mode of
admission to college than the old; and when it is remembered that the
classical system has the control of all the endowed secondary schools,
the prestige of past success, and the support of the most powerful
social influence, it is difficult to understand on what the opposition
to the free development of the "new education" is based. Are not
gentlemen, who have been talking of a revolution in education, taking
counsel of their fears rather than of their better judgment; and are
they not forgetting that the teachers of natural science have the same
interest in upholding the principles of sound education as have their
classical colleagues? Certainly there can be no question that, in the
future as in the past, they will ever seek to maintain the integrity of
all the great departments of the university unimpaired. It has happened
before this that the judgment, even of intelligent men, has been warped
by their class relations or supposed interests; but as, in this country,
the learned class has no control of government patronage, we may at
least hope that the discussion of the Greek question will never assume
with us the great bitterness that a similar controversy has aroused in
Germany.
[O] This article was written and read to the Faculty of Harvard
College shortly after Lord Coleridge's visit to the United
States, in the autumn of 1883.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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