548 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
its peculiar work. The college is confining itself more and more closely 
bo its work of education of the graduate passing into business life or of 
she man going upward into the university. The schools are similarly tak- 
ing defined places in the general system, and complying more fully with 
‘he demand of the college and the university for good preparation of their 
entering classes, and with the demand of the people for a fitting prepara- 
tion of the youth passing out from them into the common vocations of 
life. The independent schools are choosing their work, concentrating 
their strength and energies, and better and better performing a more and 
more precisely defined part of the great work. 
Organization, systematization, concentration, specialization, union of 
listinctly separated and different elements into an orderly and complete 
whole, are the striking characteristics of the changes now progressing in 
our whole educational system. The outcome will probably be the forma- 
tion of complete State organizations of schools, constructed with reference 
to the needs of a people, from kindergarten and primary school to college 
and university and professional school, including manual-training and 
trade schools, properly distributed as above indicated to be desirable, and, 
codperating with this organic whole, here and there a special school inde- 
pendently doing its chosen work and serving as a stimulus and example 
so the official school. ~ Washington’s great hope—the Washington na- 
tional university—may, perhaps, ere long take form and assume as its 
province that of preparation of strong men, of refitting learned teachers 
and professors for the universities and colleges of the States, and, espe- 
cially, of carrying on and promoting research in every field of human 
snowledge. We have had no real university since the days of the Ptole- 
mies and the foundation of the Alexandrian school. The monastic and 
scholastic element gave us but a narrow and fragmentary education. The 
introduction of the sciences during the years since Newton and Gilbert, 
of the applied sciences since Lavoisier, of the arts since Vaucanson, and 
of instruction in the constructive professions, beside that offered the 
older “learned ” professions—these have reconstituted the university ; 
and now, as never before for two thousand years past, we have looming 
ap before us the outlines of an all-enclosing educational structure which 
comprehends the learning and the principles of the whole range of the lit- 
eratures, the arts, and the sciences of contemporary human development. 
Of this horizon and zenith-reaching arch, perfect and complete as it 
soon may be, culture and learning are the voussoirs, and technical educa- 
sion is the keystone which sustains the whole and its superincumbent bur- 
den, the higher life of a people. 
Those hundred * prophetic voices concerning America,” preserved by 
Charles Sumner in his remarkable little book under that title, unite in 
predicting marvelous growth and a wonderful future for the people of 
the United States—which means, at a not distant future time. at least the