LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY

MAY 29, 1895

SPECIALIZATION IN EDUCATION

JOHN MAXSON STILLMAN

Professor of Chemistry, Leland Stanford Junior University

ADDRESS TO THE GRADUATES

DAVID STARR JORDAN

President, Leland Stanford Junior University

PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

SPECIALIZATION IN EDUCATION.

JOHN MAXSON STILLMAN.

Education, in the somewhat restricted sense in which we commonly use the term, is the systematic effort to economize and to augment the mental and moral development of the individual. It attempts to equip him at the least possible cost of time and waste of energy, with the most important results of the accumulated thought and experience of mankind. Its highest aim is the fitting of the individual to be of the greatest possible service to the race. In general it is also true that the man fitted to be of greatest service to the race, is also best fitted to improve his own condition, and to increase his own comfort and happiness. A system of education which should ignore the first and greater object would contain the seed of its own dissolution, for in the long run society is banded together against organized selfishness.

In former ages, systematic education was designed only for the priesthood. Later it became also a preparation for the other so-called learned professions — law and medicine -and a distinguishing badge, an accomplishment, a luxury for the sons of gentlemen. The "educated classes" formed a caste, and often a narrow and a jealous caste. The increase and wider distribution of wealth and the increasing demands of a progressive civilization, have tended to break down the barriers hedging an educated caste. Step by step the conviction has gained ground that education is the right of the many, rather than the privilege of the few.

Gradually society is becoming convinced that universal education, and a generous education, is one of the few good things of which there can not be too much, and the best paying investment for her security and prosperity. The immense sums expended from the public treasury, or through private munificence, for educational purposes, are capital which society has invested not for individual beneft at the expense of others, but for her own best interests, and we may depend upon it that in the end she will see to it that she receives the full interest due, in terms of honest and efficient service rendered to the material development or the social welfare of humanity.

It is evident that the methods and materials of education must vary with the needs of the time and the ever-changing conditions of civilization. The best education that could be devised in the seventeenth century differs from the best that the nineteenth has developed, and the twentieth century will bring new requirements. To a certain extent the education of today is the outgrowth from past conditions and past needs. On the other hand, the best education of today is the result of a more or less successful effort to forecast the conditions and requirements of the future. It can not be otherwise. The youth now receiving instruction in thousands of class-rooms in the United States are preparing for a life-work in the future, and, in so far as may be, their training has been shaped to meet the probable conditions of their social environment. From a study of the history of the past and the conditions of the present we endeavor to discover tendencies of human thought and action which will be influential in determining the conditions of the future. The more clearly these tendencies can be discerned the more successfully may be laid the foundation of future usefulness. The earnest teacher has faith in a progressive development of human society, however slow it may be, and also in the possibility through education of influencing this development. If he has not this faith, there is lacking an important source of inspiration.

The problems, then, that face advanced educators today are commensurate in their importance with the problems which already confront our civilization, or which more or less distinctly are discerned through the mists which veil the future.

The century now nearing its close has been a period of unexampled material and industrial progress, and I believe also of social and political improvement as well. Though we are confronted with wholesale corruption, rascality, and crime, it is yet reassuring to remember that they are generally and clearly recognized to be corruption, rascality, and crime, and not called honesty, rectitude, and beneficence, even by the most corrupt exponents of public opinion.

Many causes have conspired to make the past century thus remarkable in its development: rapid methods of transit, rapid and cheap intercommunication of ideas, railroads, steamships, telegraph - but more than all, the increase of education and the consequent emancipation of thought from the thraldom of old philosophies and dead dogmas.

The impulse arising from the study of natural and physical science has played no small part in this stimulation of latent human possibilities. Naturally there have arisen from the changing conditions of life new social, political, and industrial problems, making necessary a more varied and different educational preparation. The great variety of schools for general and special training, and the diversity of ideas as to function and methods of education, are evidence of the attempt to suit educational methods to the various needs of the time.

The century soon to be ushered in will doubtless carry forward, perhaps still more rapidly, the industrial and material development of civilization. Its achievements may be greater than those of the nineteenth; but it would be strange if the future century were not beset with difficulties and dangers commensurate with the magnificence of its promise in other directions.