552 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
amount of learning. I think I should have proposed to the young man to give up that 
course and go to the institute and obtain a grand, good course, in which he certainly 
would have a good professional training and just as much of culture as could be intro- 
duced with it. You must train young men as you find them. You must take the block 
as it is formed. 1f you attempt to cut an Adonis out of a Hercules, you would be dis- 
appointed, especially if you attempted it the other way round. 
One of the extremely hard cases is how to treat a gentleman of wealth. He comes to 
me with his son and wants to put his boy in the engineering school. He says: “That 
coy has no interest except in dynamos and things of that sort ; he has gone through the 
high-school, and I don’t think it is worth while to send him to school any longer.” 1f 
[ can get hold of the boy I can generally settle that question pretty promptly. As a 
general rule, I tell the father to keep the boy in college just as leng as possible, keep 
nim there until he has had a good liberal education ; keep him at that for two reasons— 
it will give him the kind of work that he needs to make his character a little more sym- 
metrical, and the boy who sat at the foot of the class for four years needed most the 
craining that he wasn’t able to get. As to the question of preparation for rich or for 
poor or for the middle class, I should say the schools have nothing to do with that. 
The problem of our schools and system of education is to prepare a course of education 
of which our pupils may avail themselves. Give them that selection, election, and grada- 
ion of courses which would allow any man to attain the aim that he ultimately seeks. 
As between the rich man and his son, and the man in moderate circumstances and his 
son, I should presume that. in either case the same preparatory work would apply. He 
wants a general acquaintance with literature and sciences in their development, and the 
arts so far as they have been developed, as time and means will permit. Now if a man 
is rich enough to give his boy eight years of continuous study, he may take one of two 
methods. He may send him to a good technical school, if the boy’s taste leads that 
way, and then he may undertake to give him a liberal education beyond that. Or he 
may send the boy from the preparatory school into college. Give him a course in 
college, for there is a wide range in college now. Let him complete his course in the 
college, let him acquire that knowledge of history, of literature, of the arts, that the 
true university course ought to give ; then send him to his professional school. 
I am so situated as to be able to make many observations, We have. as some of you 
now, in the institation with which I am connected. a set of courses laid out in the uni- 
versity, each one of which embodies a large line of elective work. We also have courses 
1aid out in engineering, and other courses which make a man a professional man so far 
as training may do so. The great mass of our students come directly from preparatory 
schools and enter the technological school ; come there and go right on into business 
Here and there a young man comes into the university, takes up a course in science and 
letters—so-called arts course—and continues that until he is ready to pass out of the uni- 
versity into a professional school. If he has come from the engineering school his taste 
and opportunities combine to make his two years of study largely of pure and applied 
science. When he graduates and enters the technological school he then will have had 
all your mathematics and applied mathematics and physics and chemistry, and even a 
large amount of applied science working in the laboratory, so he has practically com- 
Jleted two years of work in the technical school, and so he goes and gives two further 
years in the technical school, and finally graduates at the end of six years. 
If this boy attempts the other system, and goes into the technical school, and later 
applies for entrance into the university, he usually finds that he is required to know 
ancient and modern languages, perhaps more than he is able to obtain. and he has to 
go back into the preparatory school first, and then to the technical school. The pro- 
portion of young men who are taking advanced work in these schools increases, and is 
mn larger proportion made up of the young men who have had their general training 
vefore they have had their special training. If the young man cannot find time or 
means to take a good general course first, in which he shall be made acquainted with 
what in modern times is termed culture, and then takes his professional course, he then 
nas no alternative. He must go into the professional school as soon as he can. It is 
aot a discrimination between rich and poor. That is made by nature, and the school 
sannot control it. 
The question is raised whether the educator or the professional man should determine 
the choice. I think the educator shouid have the majority vote or veto power over all 
propositions relating to this matter, but I think if he is wise he will keep himself in 
touch both with the man of the profession and the pupils of the classes from which that 
support is drawn. 
A wise general listens with great interest and care and candidness to those who con- 
stitute his council of war. In the engineering business that council of war is composed