o do."

In every walk of life, among statesmen, men of business, and artisans,
exist noble examples of exceptional profundity and reality of
knowledge, but in the great average of so-called educated people of
our own generation, we find the majority possessing very fragmentary
interest in any of the subjects which, as students, were supposed to
engage their attention. What they would have been without the
so-called education we cannot judge, and it might be unfair to infer,
but what they are no discriminating person, with a knowledge of what
our systems claim, can fail to see. We cannot ignore the fact that for
some reason they have failed to attain their natural and possible
development.

Our educational theories, on paper and in text-books, are well-nigh
perfect; in actual operation why should they fail? Like a great
machine, fed with the material of thought, the crank turns, the wheels
go round, and the whole world is a-buzz with the work and the noise,
but the creature on whom all this power is expended, is only in rare
instances a truly educated man or woman. What, then, is the defect? If
the machine is right, then the material with which it is fed must be
defective. If the material is right, then the machine has every virtue
except that of adaptation to the use for which it was intended.

Since the whole end and aim of education is to develop, not the ideal
mental constitution, but the real mind just as we find it, the real
creature just as he is; and since we cannot change the human mind to
make it fit the machine, the effort should be to adapt the educational
process to suit the human mind. To what extent they are doing this is
one of the great questions for teachers of the present day. To what
extent,--admitting that now in some particulars they fail,--it may be
possible to modify and adapt methods to the actual and genuine needs
of human nature, is certainly a problem worthy of the earnest thought
of the broadest and best cultured minds. In attempts at adaptation we
have fallen into a process of analyzing the youthful human creature.
Having discovered that he possesses mathematical capacity, we have
supplied him with mathematical training, and have in this department
thrust upon him all, and sometimes more, hard work than he can bear.
Having found he possessed religious faculty, we have emptied upon him
the theologies and psychologies, and when we have supplied him in
these and other directions we look for