The experience of language teachers in college and university does not give much comfort to those who claim that language study should be begun early. These teachers claim that the students who have had previous language study do no better than those who have had none. It seems, however, that there certainly ought to be _some_ advantage in beginning language study early and spreading the study out over the high school period. But what is gained does not offset the tremendous loss that follows from requiring _all_ high school students to study a foreign language merely to give an opportunity for early study to those who are to go on in the university with language courses. A mature university student that has a real interest in language and literature can begin his language study in the university and make rapid progress. Some of the best classical scholars whom the author knows began their language study in the university. While it would have been of some advantage to them to have begun their language study earlier, there are so few who should go into this kind of work that society cannot afford to make provision for their beginning the study in the high school. The selection and arrangement of the studies in the curriculum must be based on other grounds than the laws of memory. What children make most progress in and need most to know are the concrete things of their physical and social environment. Children must first learn the world--the woods and streams and birds and flowers and plants and animals, the earth, its rocks and soils and the wonderful forces at work in it. They must learn man,--what he is and what he does and how he does it; how he lives and does his work and how he governs himself. They should also learn to read and to write their mother tongue, and should learn something of that great store of literature written in the mother tongue. The few that are to be scholars in language and literature must wait till beginning professional study before taking up their foreign language; just as a person who is to be a lawyer or physician must also wait till time to enter a university before beginning special professional preparation. The child's memory for abstract conceptions is particularly weak in early years; hence studies should be so arranged as to acquaint the child with the concrete aspects of the world first, and later to acquaint him with the abstract relations of things. Mathematics should come late in the child's life, for the same reason. Mathematics deals with quantitative relations which the child can neither learn nor remember profitably and economically till he is more mature. The child should first learn the world in its descriptive aspects.