of the
matter is the one that is of interest to us, and the school life of the
present, instead of arousing our regrets by its brevity, may well call
out our astonishment by its length, and demand the use of our best wits
to see the changes which have been caused in the life of the present and
to forecast those which in the future will flow from this fundamental
change in education.

One of these correlated changes is already apparent--the extension of
the period of book learning for many thousands of persons into the
college and university course.

In 1850 the total attendance on colleges in the United States was about
ten thousand. Half a century later, when the population of the country
had increased about three and one-third times, the college students had
increased in a tenfold ratio, or more than three times as rapidly as the
population. Even more significant is the growth of the number of college
students in more recent years. Since 1889 the number has more than
doubled, thus continuing in the latest years a ratio of growth with
reference to population quite as great as in earlier years.

An equally significant, and quite as conspicuous change, is seen in the
growth of technical education. Thirty years ago, when I came to
Wisconsin, the university was graduating from two or three and a half
dozen engineers yearly, and these could not all find occupation in this
commonwealth, with a population then of more than a million people. Now
a hundred graduates go out at Commencement, while the population of the
state has little more than doubled, and while other engineering schools
of high rank have multiplied all around it.

Nowadays the man of books, rather than the man of tradition is directing
the work of the world. In the copper mines of the north the
old-fashioned mine captain, who received his profession and his
traditions from his father, is disappearing and has almost vanished. His
place is taken by the graduate of a mining school, who interprets what
he sees, not by the light of the experience of his elders, communicated
to him orally, but by the far clearer light of the collective experience
of men embodied in books.

When the capitalist now desires to explore for new iron mines he employs
not the old-fashioned prospector, but puts into the field a party of
young men often fresh from the geological laboratory. Thus science,
organized knowledge, book learning, is driving out with increasing
rapidity the pi