as much as
the whole is greater than any part--in the school-life and work of every
boy and girl admitted to the benefits of our courses of instruction.

Thus we have endeavored, with some particularity of examination and
detail, to find and state not only what _are_, but what _should be_, the
tendencies of educational thought and effort in our country and times.
And we seem to find that those tendencies _are_, in spite of a
stand-still conservatism or perplexed doubt in some quarters, and of a
conflict of views and practices in others, largely in the direction in
which the ends to be sought show that they _should be_. The _Education
to be_, as far as the intellectual being is concerned, when time and
study shall better have determined the conditions, and furnished the
working instrumentalities, is to be, not in name merely, but in fact, an
education by simply natural employment and development of all the
perceiving, reasoning, originative, and productive faculties of the
mind. It is to be such, because it is to insist on proceeding, after
proper age, and then upon every suitable topic, by observation and
investigation, and so, by discovery of the principles and results the
mind is desired to attain; because it will be an education by rigidly
consecutive, comprehended and firm lines of advance, employing processes
analytic and synthetic, inductive and deductive, each in its requisite
place and in accordance with the nature and stage of the topics under
investigation. For the like reasons, it will have become, what we have
long foreseen and desired that education should be, rightly progressive
in form, and in character such as must develop, strengthen, and store
the mind; such as must best fit, so far as the merely scholastic
education can do this, for practical expression and use of what is
learned, showing all our acquired knowledge in the light of its actual
and various relationships, and conferring true serviceableness and the
largest value, whether for enjoyment or execution.

Such an education would be _real_ in its method as well as in its
substance. We have fairly entered upon the era in which education must
be, and, spite of any temporary recoil of timorous despotisms, must
continue to be, popular and universal. But many are too apt to forget
that, upon our planet, this thing of popular and universal education is
comparatively a new and untried experience; that, so far as its mode and
substance are concerned, i