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An Educational Experi- The experiment of bringing one-third of all the school teachers of Cuba to the United States on a tour of observation originated with the American head of the Department of Education in Cuba, and should go a little way toward mitigating the unfortunate scandals which have developed in other parts of the trusteeship assumed by the United States Government. The purpose of this Cuban invasion is to give a practical illustration to the instructors of the island of the methods adopted here of teaching the young. The public school teachers will be brought here, will remain at Cambridge some six weeks or more, and will be taken back to Cuba free of all expense. Some 1,450 persons will make up the expedition, which should reach Cambridge, Mass., at the end of June. To quote from an account of the undertaking in the New York Sun:

The plans made for the teachers are interesting. They are to arrive in Boston on five Government transports on July 1, and so will witness a genuine American Fourth of July. They will be taken to Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill and Boston Common and Plymouth Rock, they will have a look at Yankee schoolhouses, and schoolrooms, and school children and school ma'ams, and they will have a glimpse at the interior of New England homes and at American life. Forty Harvard students and Radcliffe girls will try to teach them a little English, and courses to be conducted in Spanish have been arranged in physical geography and American institutions and the history of the Spanish Colonies in America. Instruction has been provided for, too, by special gifts, in botany and in kindergarten methods. There will be excursions, scientific and historical, and lectures, and after Harvard has done what it can, provision will be made for a trip to Niagara and Chicago and Washington.

That serious direct results will be obtained from forty days' actual teaching, no one expects; the object of the expedition is much broader, and is to be attained rather "by the cordial and prompt hospitality shown by the community," as Mr. Adams puts it: "The effect on the minds and hearts of the

JULY, 1900

teachers is to be produced by the sight of our people and our homes, and through personal acquaintance with our modes of life and with the evidences of our civilization. The result of the undertaking should be to plant in every Cuban village a teacher who has seen the best side of American life, and who has learned a little about the organization of public instruction in the United States, and about the best methods in teaching in language, history and natural history." Who has seen with his bodily eyes, that is, that the great world has been moving during the centuries that Spain has dozed away, and that free Cuba cannot be a land of "mañana." Secretary Root says: "I believe that this body of teachers going back after their experiences here and scattering into every municipality in Cuba will carry back more of saving grace for peaceful and prosperous Cuba than the whole power of the Government could accomplish in any other way."

There has been no little deThe Educational Drift bate in the past few years over the value of classics in the education of young men. Yet there has been little evidence that college faculties were prepared to abandon Latin and Greek either before or after a young man had entered upon his regular course. The modern American notion has been, however, that the classics have been cultivated to the exclusion of more useful studies, and that this idea has crept more profoundly into the minds of instructors than people imagine, may by inferred by the fact that Columbia College now announces that neither Greek nor Latin is required to enter the university. Among the subjects now available for entrance examination are Spanish, botany, zoology, physiography and other departments which have heretofore been taught in the later parts of the college course. The only two required things are English and mathematics, each of them counting three in a total of fifteen points. Of the rest selection may be made from a list including Greek and Latin, History, German, physics and other branches. Writing about

this marked change the Springfield Republican says:

It is not surprising that the conservative view with some alarm the upsetting of all the traditions of higher education, and fear that the result will be a hodge-podge of ill-assorted studies from which the student may get almost anything except a sound and well-planned education. But it seems clear that the tide is setting too strongly in the new currents to be checked, and the only thing that can be done is to plant some effective substitute for the ancient and valuable training in the humanities. To utilize the principle of individual option effectively it is manifest that effort must be made to give the student more individual attention. In the old highway of learning, dusty with the tread of generations, students could be herded like cattle and driven to their destination. Now that they are turned loose in the flowery meadows of knowledge they must be more carefully looked after and kept from straying among rank and unwholesome herbage. The present development was inevitable, but it is not a satisfactory or permanent substitute. It represents merely a revolt from the conventional standards, and will require much pruning and rearrangement.

The general argument against the classics is rather one in favor of English as the best groundwork for an education. It is perhaps well expressed in the following extract from a recent article in the New York Tribune:

Our London correspondent recently gave an interesting and most suggestive account of the experience of an American boy at one of the great preparatory schools of England, where he was practically rejected because, though he was well versed in general branches of study, he had not made a specialty of grinding out verses in Latin and Greek. At about the same time it was announced that the founders of a new English university had decided to model their institution largely after certain American examples, and also that one important American college had almost entirely dropped the classics from its regular course in "Arts," formerly known as the "classical course," at least to the extent of entirely omitting both Latin and Greek from the entrance requirements, and of omitting Greek from the course leading to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. These facts were sufficient to set many a man to thinking seriously about the contrast between some English and some American educational methods, and about the tendencies which are now manifesting themselves so strongly in this country in the direction of breaking away from what has been called the "college fetich" of the classics. There can be no doubt, from the accepted

American point of view, that it is folly to make boys of from twelve to fifteen toil over machinemade Latin and Greek verse, to the neglect of the English language and the practical sciences. that score there are hundreds of incomparably better preparatory schools scattered all over the United States than the famous English school to which our correspondent referred. Indeed, we can scarcely believe that the system there prevailing is general throughout English preparatory schools. The high standard and practical character of current English scholarship forbid it. So far as it does prevail, its supersession by the American system, or by what has hitherto been the American system, must seem desirable. For, as our correspondent reminds us, while the making of Latin and Greek verse is not a prerequisite to admission to an American preparatory school, the standard of scholarship required for admission to college is higher at the chief American colleges than at the great English universities. It seems not unreasonable to conclude, therefore, that it is actually wiser for young Englishmen to come hither for college education than for young Americans to go to English seats of learning.

This view of the English and foreign method is by no means reflected in an article by Professor Münsterberg upon School Reform, which lately appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. The article, which is eminently conservative, has attracted no little attention. The writer attacks the modern theories and declares that what our modern schools need is not "so-called scientific pedagogy," but more teachers who have "an inspiring enthusiasm for their science, which springs from a profound scholarly knowledge." To quote from remarks upon the article in the New York Evening Post:

After describing his experience at a teachers' meeting that ended with a lunch at which "some minor speeches were served up on the pernicious influence of the classical languages, and on the value of stenography and typewriting for a liberal education," he tells how he himself, entering the gymnasium at Dantzig when nine years old, left it at eighteen after a course of study which would have prepared him to enter the senior class of Harvard College. The entrance examinations at Harvard, the severest in America, he could have passed at fifteen. Nor to accomplish this was he at all overworked. He had three hours every day in the open air, besides music lessons; and "at every stage there were private theatricals, and excursions into the country, and dancing lessons, and horse-back riding." And withal he had time to have a passion for botany at nine, another for physics at twelve,

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