features that we may discover in present systems.

For instance, a powerful selective feature is the attractiveness of a
given course of study to those who are desired to pursue it. If we can
find a way, for example, to make our high school courses attractive to
those who are qualified to take them, while at the same time rendering
them very distasteful to those who are not so qualified, we shall
evidently have taken a step in the right direction. It is clear that both
parts of this prescription must be taken together or there is no true
selection. Much has been done of late years toward making educational
courses of all kinds interesting and attractive, but it is to be feared
that their attractiveness has been such as to appeal to the unfit as well
as to the fit. If we sugar-coat our pills indiscriminately and mix them
with candy, many will partake who need another kind of medicine
altogether. We must so arrange things that the fit will like while the
unfit dislike, and for this purpose the less sugar-coating the better.
This is no easy problem and it is intended merely to indicate it here, not
to propose a general solution.

The one thing to which attention should be directed is the role that may
be and is played by the printed book in selective education. There is more
or less effort to discredit books as educative tools and to lay emphasis
on oral instruction and manual training. We need not decry these, but, it
must be remembered that after all the book contains the record of man's
progress; we may tell how to do a thing, and show how to do it, but we
shall never do it in a better way or explain the why and wherefore, and
surely transmit that ability and that explanation to posterity, without
the aid of a stable record of some kind. If we are sure that our students
could and would pick out only what they needed, as a wild animal picks his
food in the woods, we might go far toward solving our problem, by simply
turning them loose in a collection of books. Some people have minds that
qualify them to profit by such "browsing," and some of these have
practically educated themselves in a library. Even in the more common
cases where formal training is absolutely necessary, access to other books
than text-books is an aid to selection both qualitative and quantitative.
Books may serve as samples. To take an extreme case, a boy who had no
knowledge whatever of the nature of law or medicine would certainly not be
competent