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I have taken so much of your time this morning that an apology seems due for the things I have omitted to mention. I have said nothing of the organization of the college, nothing of the social life of the students, nothing of the relations with the alumni, nothing of the needs and qualifications of the teachers, and even within the consideration of the course of study, nothing of the value of specialization or of the disciplinary subjects or of the training in language and expression. And I have put these aside deliberately, for the sake of a cause which is greater than any of them-a cause which lies at the very heart of the liberal college. It is the cause of making clear to the American people the mission of the teacher, of convincing them of the value of knowledge: not the specialized knowledge which contributes to immediate practical aims, but the unified understanding which is Insight.

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND PRACTICE IN WRITING

I. Take issue with, or defend, the view that the teacher is the one best qualified to give opinion on matters of educational practice. 2. Explain the difference between a liberal college and a technical or a professional school. Illustrate by well-known institutions. 3. Show how the student activities of college life may contribute to the training which is the object of the college. 4. Apart from some of the experiences of friendship and sympathy I doubt if there are any human interests as permanently satisfying, so fine and splendid in themselves, as are those of intellectual activity" (page 39). Discuss friendship, sympathy, and intellectual activity as the three great human experiences. Should any others be added to them? 5. Compare the views on specialization expressed in this selection with those expressed in the selection, Specialization, page 145. 6. How satisfactory is the statement of the five “elements" (page 49) which the student of the liberal college should have as the constituents of his course? 7. Select some study which you think should have reality for you but which you have found to lack this quality in your experience with it. Indicate what your difficulties have been.

THE NEW DEFINITION OF THE CULTIVATED MAN 1

CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT

[Charles William Eliot (1834- -) has been one of the foremost figures in American education for a great many years. During the larger part of his career as an educator, he was president of Harvard College, retiring in 1909 as president emeritus. He has written widely on educational topics, and has exerted a powerful influence in the shaping of the tendencies of American education of the present. This selection was delivered originally as a presidential address before the National Education Association.]

To produce the cultivated man, or at least the man capable of becoming cultivated in after-life, has long been supposed to be one of the fundamental objects of systematic and thorough education. The ideal of general cultivation has been one of the standards in education. It is often asked: Will the education which a given institution is supplying produce the cultivated man? Or, Can cultivation be the result of a given course of study? In such questions there is an implication that the education which does not produce the cultivated man is a failure, or has been misconceived, or misdirected. Now, if cultivation were an unchanging ideal, the steady use of the conception as a permanent test of educational processes might be justified; but if the cultivated man of to-day is, or ought to be, a distinctly different creature from the cultivated man of a century ago, the ideal of cultivation cannot be appealed to as a standard without preliminary explanations and interpretations. It is the object of this paper to show that the idea of cultivation in the highly trained human being has undergone substantial changes during the nineteenth century.

I ought to say at once that I propose to use the term "cultivated man" in only its good sense-in Emerson's sense. In this paper, he is not to be a weak, critical, fastidious creature,

1 Reprinted by permission of the author and by special arrangement with the publishers from Education for Efficiency (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.),

vain of a little exclusive information or of an uncommon knack in Latin verse or mathematical logic; he is to be a man of quick perceptions, broad sympathies, and wide affinities; responsive, but independent; self-reliant, but deferential; loving truth and candor, but also moderation and proportion; courageous, but gentle; not finished, but perfecting. All authorities agree that true culture is not exclusive, sectarian, or partisan, but the very opposite; that it is not to be attained in solitude, but in society; and that the best atmosphere for culture is that of a school, university, academy, or church, where many pursue together the ideals of truth, righteousness, and love.

Here someone may think: This process of cultivation is evidently a long, slow, artificial process; I prefer the genius, the man of native power or skill, the man whose judgment is sound and influence strong, though he cannot read or write-the born inventor, orator, or poet. So do we all. Men have always reverenced prodigious inborn gifts, and always will. Indeed, barbarous men always say of the possessors of such gifts: These are not men, they are gods. But we teachers, who carry on a system of popular education which is by far the most complex and valuable invention of the nineteenth century, know that we have to do, not with the highly gifted units, but with the millions who are more or less capable of being cultivated by the long, patient, artificial training called education. For us and our system the genius is no standard, but the cultivated man is. To his stature we and many of our pupils may in time

attain.

There are two principal differences between the present ideal of cultivation and that which prevailed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. All thinkers agree that the horizon of the human intellect has widened wonderfully during the past hundred years, and that the scientific method of inquiry, which was known to but very few when the nineteenth century began, has been the means of that widening. This method has become indispensable in all fields of inquiry, including psychology, philanthropy, and religion; and therefore intimate acquaintance with it has become an indispensable element in culture. As

Matthew Arnold pointed out more than a generation ago, educated mankind is governed by two passions-one the passion! for pure knowledge, the other the passion for being of service or doing good. Now, the passion for pure knowledge is to be gratified only through the scientific method of inquiry. In Arnold's phrases, the first step for every aspirant to culture is to endeavor to see things as they are or "to learn, in short, the will of God." The second step is to make that will prevail, each in his own sphere of action and influence. This recognition of science as pure knowledge, and of the scientific method as the universal method of inquiry, is the great addition made by the nineteenth century to the idea of culture. I need not say that within that century what we call science, pure and applied, has transformed the world as the scene of the human drama; and that it is this transformation which has compelled the recognition of natural science as a fundamental necessity in liberal education. The most convinced exponents and advocates of humanism now recognize that science is the "paramount force of the modern as distinguished from the antique and the medieval spirit," 1 and that "an interpenetration of humanism with science and of science with humanism is the condition of the highest culture."

A second modification of the earlier idea of cultivation was advocated by Ralph Waldo Emerson more than two generations ago. He taught that the acquisition of some form of manual skill and the practice of some form of manual labor were essential elements of culture. This idea has more and more become accepted in the systematic education of youth; and if we include athletic sports among the desirable forms of manual skill and labor, we may say that during the last thirty years this element of excellence of body in the ideal of education has had a rapid, even an exaggerated, development. The idea of some sort of bodily excellence was, to be sure, not absent in the old conception of the cultivated man. The gentleman could ride well, dance gracefully, and fence with skill. But the modern conception of bodily skill as an element in cultivation 1 John Addington Symonds, Culture.

is more comprehensive, and includes that habitual contact with the external world which Emerson deemed essential to real culture. We have lately become convinced that accurate work with carpenters' tools, or lathe, or hammer and anvil, or violin, or piano, or pencil, or crayon, or camel's-hair brush, trains well the same nerves and ganglia with which we do what is ordinarily called thinking. We have also become convinced that some intimate, sympathetic acquaintance with the natural objects of the earth and sky adds greatly to the happiness of life, and that this acquaintance should be begun in childhood and be developed all through adolescence and maturity. A brook, a hedgerow, or a garden is an inexhaustible teacher of wonder, reverence, and love. The scientists insist to-day on nature study for children; but we teachers ought long ago to have learned from the poets the value of this element in education. They are the best advocates of nature study. If any here are not convinced of its worth, let them go to Theocritus, Virgil, Wordsworth, Tennyson, or Lowell for the needed demonstration. Let them observe, too, that a great need of modern industrial society is intellectual pleasures, or pleasures which, like music, combine delightful sensations with the gratifications of observation, association, memory, and sympathy. The idea of culture has always included a quick and wide sympathy with men; it should hereafter include sympathy with nature, and particularly with its living forms, a sympathy based on some accurate observation of nature. The bookworm, the monk, the isolated student, has never been the type of the cultivated man. Society has seemed the natural setting for the cultivated person, man or woman; but the present conception of real culture contains not only a large development of this social element, but also an extension of interest and reverence to the animate creation and to those immense forces that set the earthly stage for man and all related beings.

Let us now proceed to examine some of the changes in the idea of culture, or in the available means of culture, which the last hundred years have brought about.