his disease will grow
worse before a remedy can be applied. The first attempt to cultivate
broader and more varied fields of knowledge in the common school must
necessarily exhibit a shallow result. Teachers are not familiar with
the new subjects, methods are not developed, and the proper adjustments
of the studies to each other are neglected. No one who is at all
familiar with our present status will claim that drawing, natural
science, geography, and language are yet properly adjusted to each
other. The task is a difficult one, but it is being grappled with by
many earnest teachers.

It is obvious that the first serious effort to _remedy_ this
shallowness will be made by deepening and intensifying the culture of
the new fields. The knowledge of each subject must be made as complete
and detailed as possible. Well-qualified teachers and specialists will
of course accomplish the most. They will zealously try to teach all
the important things in each branch of study. But where is the limit?
The capacity of children! And it will not be long before
philanthropists, physicians, reformers, and all the friends of mankind
will call a decisive halt. Children were not born simply to be stuffed
with knowledge, like turkeys for a Christmas dinner.

It appears, therefore, that we must steer between Scylla and Charybdis,
or that we are in a first-class educational _dilemma_. This conviction
is strengthened by the reflection that there is no escape from fairly
facing the situation. Having once put our hand to the plow we can not
look back. The common school course has greatly expanded in recent
years and there is no probability that it will ever contract. It has
expanded in response to proper universal educational demands. For we
may fairly believe that most of the studies recently incorporated into
the school course are essential elements in the education of every
child that is to grow up and take a due share in our society. It is
too late to sound the retreat. The educational reformers have battled
stoutly for three hundred years for just the course of study that we
are now beginning to accept. The edict can not be revoked, that every
child is entitled to an harmonious and equable development of all its
human powers, or as Herbart calls it, a harmonious culture of
many-sided interests. The nature of every child imperatively demands
such broad and liberal culture, and the varied duties and
responsibilities of the