Report Volume 50 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1879 Excerpt: ...able, willing and strong enough to combat and resist the dense hosts of opposing ignorance, or the gradual surrender of political dignity and national self-respect. COURSE OF STUDY IN HIGH SCHOOLS. I have so often and so fully discussed this question in previous reports, as well as in educational Lectures and Essays, that I have little to add to it in this connection. An essential misapprehension, not only of the proper disposition or arrangement of studies, but a misconception of the end and purpose of study, is one of the saddest educational indications of our era. With the progress of materialism in science, sensualism in philosophy, and utilitarianism in every phase of modern life, the fundamental truth that education deals directly with minds, only indirectly with temporal vocations or callings, and that its objective point is pure culture, has become almost a tradition of a long gone age. The sympathetic alliance of materialism in science, and sensualism in philosophy, involves the subordination of the noblest capacities of the human intellect to the attainment of mere utility as its end and ideal. The complexity of modern civilization, the bewildering diversity of interests, passions and prejudices that control the springs of human action, are striving to degrade education from its lofty mission as the ordained instrumentality for the regeneration of man's intellectual nature into a debasing system of mere training, having for its goal the perfection of his physical nature, just as the athlete is trained for the arena, or the race-horse for the stadium. The cultivation of the purely sensuous is the " point proposed" by our modern educationists, and they would arrange all curriculums of study with reference to the attainment of this specific...