by which our children should acquire some information about themselves, the world around them, and at the same time be disciplined in observation and reasoning?
In regard to our schools there prevails the miserable delusion that they are good. We have many private and public good schools, but they constitute the small minority. Most of the young men who enter my classes after leaving our public schools are poorly disciplined in every respect, and a great many of them are absolutely uneducated: they can not express their thoughts in English; they can not spell common words; they can not translate correctly a simple phrase in Latin or any modern language, and they are ignorant of all sciences. Such is too often the condition of the graduates of the primary, grammar, and high schools of the country which claims to afford the best system of public education in the world. I have very little personal acquaintance with our schools, but to my mind their product condemns them, and I believe that our influence can do much to redeem them from their present condition.
Another public duty, which belongs especially to us, is to advance the development of universities in America. There are three grades of education—school, college, and university. In schools elementary knowledge is used to inform and develop the mind; in colleges advanced knowledge is used for the same purposes. Now it is one thing to teach what is known, as in schools, and to teach how to confirm what is known, as in colleges; but it is a fundamentally different task to advance a student to successful original investigation of the unknown. As Mill has justly remarked, the vast majority of mental operations are neither inductive nor deductive, but reasoning from particular to the particular. Minds which work in this way suffice for the routine affairs of existence, but the progress of the world depends on the higher faculty of originality, either in the inductive establishment of laws by the comparison of particulars or in the deductive applications of these laws. It is the function of universities to develop and discipline originality, to cultivate the faculty of thinking out a conclusion for the first time—not for the first time in the history of the thinker, but for the first time in the history of the world.
To train men to originality in every field of production is the proper function of a true university. This has long been the accepted ideal of German universities, and because they have steadily striven for this ideal they have attained a fame which draws to them students from every other country. In America we are slowly creating a few universities. Of nominal universities we have too many—false Duessas, fair in semblance, but not true to their pretensions. We have, in fact, as yet nothing to
