THE NEW EDUCATION

Dr. Abraham Flexner, the distinguished educational expert, has attracted much attention by his attacks on our present educational system, and by his plans for instruction based largely on the training of sense rather than memory, as President Eliot expresses it. It is an interesting idea, already partly introduced in the public schools of Maryland. Dr. Flexner would divide the curriculum into four fields: science, industry, civics and aesthetics, proposing subjects and methods of immediate interest and practical value. Such a basis is surely sound. Every school boy has rebelled at "conjugating dead languages and reciting the imports of Uruguay."

What we dislike in such ultra-modern programs is that they tend to make education a vocational training instead of a personal cultivation, to make wealth instead of happiness the goal of a child's studies. A man of fifty surely is not a better surveyor or a better electrician for having attended a trade school at sixteen. He has simply started earlier, at the sacrifice of certain kinds of learning which cannot be acquired later. And if one fellow gets his start, others must compete with him in the same way. Thus the old condition will re-assent itself until someone takes an earlier start--still, so on, ad infinitum. But provided that the more rigorous features of these programs are omitted, such as the "professorship of public recreation" or that rumored department of hat-trimming in a certain co-educational college, the training of sense certainly has great advantages over the training of memory.