in persons as a basis for educational work, seems to some
of us to give an essentially unbelieving and pessimistic classification
of human nature for the use of teachers.

"Early education," says President Thwing, "occupies itself with
description (geometry, space, arithmetic, time, science, the world of
nature). Later education with comparison and relations." If one asks,
"Why not both together? Why learn facts at one time and their relations
at another? Is it not the most vital possible way to learn facts to
learn them in their relations?"--the answer that would be generally made
reveals that most teachers are pessimists, that they have very small
faith in what can be expected of the youngest pupils. The theory is that
interpretative minds must not be expected of them. Some of us find it
very hard to believe as little as this, in any child. Most children have
such an incorrigible tendency for putting things together that they even
put them together wrong rather than not put them together at all. Under
existing educational conditions a child is more of a philosopher at six
than he is at twenty-six.

The third stage of education for which Dr. Thwing partitions off the
human mind is the "stage in which a pupil becomes capable of original
research, a discoverer of facts and relations" himself. In theory this
means that when a man is thirty years old and all possible habits of
originality have been trained out of him, he should be allowed to be
original. In practice it means removing a man's brain for thirty years
and then telling him he can think. There never has been a live boy in a
school as yet that would allow himself to be educated in this way if he
could help it. All the daily habits of his mind resent it. It is a
pessimistic, postponing way of educating him. It does not believe in him
enough. It may be true of men in the bulk, men by the five thousand,
that their intellectual processes happen along in this conveniently
scientific fashion, at least as regards emphasis, but when it is applied
to any individual mind, at any particular time, in actual education, it
is found that it is not true, that it is pessimistic. God is not so
monotonous and the universe is not graded as accurately as a public
school, and things are much more delightfully mixed up. If a great
university were to give itself whole-heartedly and pointedly to one
single individual student, it would find it both convenient and pleasant
and natural and