A Librarians Open Shelf | Page 9

the selection by
means of which he achieves his remarkable results in plant breeding he
gets rid of the unfit by destruction, and as all are unfit for the moment
that do not advance the special end that he has in view, he burns up
plants--new and interesting varieties perhaps--by the hundred thousand.
We cannot destroy the unfit, nor do we desire to do so, for from the
educational point of view unfitness is merely bad adjustment. There is a
place for every man in the world and it is the educators business to see
that he reaches it, if not by formative, then by selective processes. This
selection is badly made in our present state of civilization. It depends to
a large extent upon circumstances remote from the training itself--upon
caprice, either that of the person to be trained or of his parents, upon
accidents of birth or situation, upon a thousand irrelevant things; but in
every case there are elements present in the training itself that aid in
determining it. A young man begins to study medicine, and he finds
that his physical repulsion for work in the dissecting-room can not be
overcome. He abandons the study and by doing so eliminates an unfit
person. A boy who has no head for figures enters a business college. He
can not get his diploma, and the community is spared one bad
bookkeeper. Certainly in some instances, possibly in all, technical and
professional schools that are noted for the excellence of their product
are superior not so much because they have better methods of training,
but because their material is of better quality, owing to selection
exercised either purposely, or automatically, or perhaps by some
chance. The same is true of colleges. Of two institutions with the same
curriculum and equally able instructors, the one with the widest

reputation will turn out the best graduates because it attracts abler men
from a wider field. This is true even in such a department as athletics.
To him that hath shall be given. This is purely an automatic selective
effect.
It would appear desirable to dwell more upon selective features in
educational training, to ascertain what they are in each case and how
they work, and to control and dispose them with more systematic care.
Different minds will always attach different degrees of importance to
natural and acquired fitness, but probably all will agree that training
bestowed upon the absolutely unfit is worse than useless, and that there
are persons whose natural aptitudes are so great that upon them a
minimum of training will produce a maximum effect. Such selective
features as our present educational processes possess, the examination,
for instance, are mostly exclusive; they aim to bar out the unfit rather
than to attract the fit. Here is a feature on which some attention may
well be fixt.
How do these considerations affect the subject of general education?
Are we to affirm that arithmetic is only for the born mathematician and
Latin for the born linguist, and endeavor to ascertain who these may be?
Not so; for here we are training not experts but citizens. Discrimination
here must be not in the quality but in the quantity of training. We may
divide the members of any community into classes according as their
formal education--their school and college training--has lasted one, two,
three, four, or more years. There has been a selection here, but it has
operated, in general, even more imperfectly than in the case of special
training. Persons who are mentally qualified to continue their schooling
to the end of a college course, and who by so doing would become
more useful members of the community, are obliged to be content with
two or three years in the lower grades, while others, who are unfitted
for the university, are kept at it until they take, or fail to take, the
bachelor's degree. An ideal state of things, of course, would be to give
each person the amount of general education for which he is fitted and
then stop. This would be difficult of realization even if financial
considerations did not so often interfere. But at least we may keep in
view the desirability of preventing too many misfits and of insisting, so
far as possible, on any selective 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