202 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS oF EDUCATION. 
was far from sterile, because the seed has not been sown to which the 
constitution of his mind was congenial. The elective system gives the boy 
the needed opportunity to meet the true nature of the student’s mind, to 
touch its dormant powers, to awaken its sleeping life. To put the mind 
in motion is the teacher’s first duty ; and is it not his highest art ? How 
inadequate has been the stereotyped curriculum of the past! A just sen- 
tence lies against it for its procrustean rigidity and formal inflexibility. 
Ample, possibly, to furnish a man for the duties of the restricted and 
andiversified life of the days of monasticism and the cloister, but wofully 
leficient to equip him for these days of enormous energies. 
The unwisdom of the adjustment between secondary schools and the 
aigher institutions has been among the marked defects in our educational 
system. This ill-adjustment has been apparent nowhere so much as in 
:he constant expansion of the elective system in the colleges, and the 
rigid holding to the old schemes of the secondary schools. 
The lack of coherence between the two kinds of institutions has been 
glaringly apparent. Latin and Greek have barred the way to a larger 
and wiser educational career, to a degree harmful to different types of 
mind, and to an extent not required for the retention and cultivation of 
shese languages in school or in college. I instance these two languages 
secause they have historically coerced other lines of study. No indict- 
ment can rest against French or German, and much less against our own 
mother tongue, for any such usurpation of the time due the prosecution 
of other subjects. 
I am among those lovers and teachers of the Greek language who feel 
shat its place in any scheme of study that would lead to a liberal and 
elegant education rests on far more substantial foundations than mere 
‘radition and prescription, and that it will continue for intrinsic reasons 
of the greatest value to educate and train the mind of man as long as 
studies are a delight and an honor. 
That a pupil, then, may be ready to make choice of the liberal provisions 
of an elective system, he should be given a wider range for sympathy, taste, 
and aptitude in the preparatory years of his school life. This amounts 
to saying, in other words, because of the traditional curriculum of the 
secondary schools, that more room must be made for natural science. 
To bring this about there must be a pruning of the time devoted to lan- 
guage studies. This adaptation of the course of studies in the secondary 
school to the elective system has been seen to be attended by an advantage 
of very great value—the earlier opening up of a wider range of sympathy, 
taste, and aptitude to the young student, that a teacher may not always be 
‘“ punishing nature in a scholar,” as quaint Thomas Fuller phrases it, 
out that the pupil may have a better chance to discover what tastes are 
patural to his mind, and what acquired, through the larger variety of 
subjects presented to him. 
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