tation and
repetition. It is conceivable that these radical doctrines were
justified as means of reform, especially in secondary and higher
education, but, even granting this, their function is fulfilled when the
reform that they exploited has been accomplished. That time has come
and, as palpable untruths, they should either be modified to meet the
facts, or be relegated to oblivion.

III

It is safe to say that formalism is no longer a characteristic feature
of the typical American school. It is so long since I have heard any
rote learning in a schoolroom that I am wondering if it is not almost
time for some one to show that a little rote learning would not be at
all a bad thing in preadolescent education. We ridicule the memoriter
methods of Chinese education and yet we sometimes forget that Chinese
education has done something that no other system of education, however
well planned, has even begun to do in the same degree. It has kept the
Chinese empire a unit through a period of time compared with which the
entire history of Greece and Rome is but an episode. We may ridicule the
formalism of Hebrew education, and yet the schools of rabbis have
preserved intact the racial integrity of the Jewish people during the
two thousand years that have elapsed since their geographical unity was
destroyed. I am not justifying the methods of Chinese or Hebrew
education. I am quite willing to admit that, in China at any rate, the
game may not have been worth the candle; but I am still far from
convinced that it is not a good thing for children to reduce to verbal
form a good many things that are now never learned in such a way as to
make any lasting impression upon the memory; and our criticism of
oriental formalism is not so much concerned with the method of learning
as with the content of learning,--not so much with learning by heart as
with the character of the material that was thus memorized.

But, although formalism is no longer a distinctive feature of American
education, formalism is the point from which education is most
frequently attacked,--and this is the chief source of my dissatisfaction
with the present-day critics of our elementary schools. In a great many
cases, they have set up a man of straw and demolished him completely.
And in demolishing him, they have incidentally knocked the props from
under the feet of many a good teacher, leaving him dazed and uncertain
of his bearings, stung with the conviction tha