COLLEGE EDUCATION.

ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF HIRAM COLLEGE, HIRAM, OHIO.

JUNE 14, 1867.

In the course of the school year 1866-67, the Trustees of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, at which Mr. Garfield had prepared for college, of which he was Principal from 1857 to 1861, and of which he was now a Trustee, took steps to clothe the institution with the powers and responsibilities of a college with its present name, Hiram College. The transition was effected at the close of that year. The occasion was recognized by the delivery of the following address. The facts now stated the change of the character and name of the school, and the adoption of a new course of study — will explain some of Mr. Garfield's remarks, especially towards the close of the address.

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ENTLEMEN OF THE LITERARY SOCIETIES, I congratulate you on the significant fact, that the questions which most vitally concern your personal work are at this time rapidly becoming, indeed have already become, questions of first importance to the whole nation. In ordinary times, we could scarcely find two subjects wider apart than the meditations of a schoolboy, when he asks what he shall do with himself, and how he shall do it, and the forecastings of a great nation, when it studies the laws of its own life, and endeavors to solve the problem of its destiny. But now there is more than a resemblance between the nation's work and yours. If the two are not identical, they at least bear the relation of the whole to a part.

The nation, having passed through the childhood of its history, and being about to enter upon a new life, based on a fuller recognition of the rights of manhood, has discovered that liberty

can be safe only when the suffrage is illuminated by education. It is now perceived that the life and light of a nation are inseparable. Hence the Federal government has established a National Department of Education, for the purpose of teaching young men and women how to be good citizens.

You, young gentlemen, having passed the limits of childhood, and being about to enter the larger world of manhood, with its manifold struggles and aspirations, are now confronted with the question, "What must I do to fit myself most completely, not for being a citizen merely, but for being all that doth become a man living in the full light of the Christian civilization of America?" Your disinthralled and victorious country asks you to be educated for her sake, and the noblest aspirations of your being still more imperatively ask it for your own sake. In the hope that I may aid you in solving some of these questions, I have chosen for my theme on this occasion, The Course of Study in American Colleges, and its Adaptation to the Wants of our Time.

Before examining any course of study, we should clearly apprehend the objects to be obtained by a liberal education. In general, it may be said that the purpose of all study is twofold, to discipline our faculties, and to acquire knowledge for the duties of life. It is happily provided in the constitution of the human mind, that the labor by which knowledge is acquired is the only means of disciplining the powers. It may be stated as a general rule, that if we compel ourselves to learn what we ought to know, and use it when learned, our discipline will take care of itself. Let us, then, inquire, What kinds of knowledge should be the objects of a liberal education?

Without adopting in full the classification of Herbert Spencer, it will be sufficiently comprehensive for my present purpose to name the following kinds of knowledge, stated in the order of their importance:

First. That knowledge which is necessary for the full development of our bodies and the preservation of our health.

Second. The knowledge of those principles by which the useful arts and industries are carried on and improved.

Third. That knowledge which is necessary to a full comprehension of our rights and duties as citizens.

1 Education, Intellectual, Moral, and Physical, Chap. I., "What Knowledge is of most Worth?"

Fourth. A knowledge of the intellectual, moral, religious, and æsthetic nature of man, and his relations to nature and civilization.

Fifth. That special and thorough knowledge which is requisite for the particular profession or pursuit which a man may choose as his life-work after he has completed his college studies.

In brief, the student should study himself, his relations to society, to nature, and to art; and above all, in all, and through all these, he should study the relations of himself, society, nature, and art, to God, the author of them all.

Of course it is not possible, nor is it desirable, to confine the course of development exclusively to this order; for truths are so related and correlated that no department of the realm of Truth is wholly isolated. We cannot learn much that pertains to the industry of society, without learning something of the material world, and the laws which govern it. We cannot study nature profoundly without bringing ourselves into communion with the spirit of art, which pervades and fills the universe. But what I suggest is, that we should make the course of study conform generally to the order here indicated; that the student shall first study what he most needs to know; that the order of his needs shall be the order of his work.

Now, it will not be denied that, from the day when the child's foot first presses the green turf till the day when, an old man, he is ready to be laid under it, there is not an hour in which he does not need to know a thousand things in relation to his body, what he shall eat, what he shall drink, and wherewithal he shall be clothed. Unprovided with that instinct which enables the lower animals to reject the noxious and select the nutritive, man must learn even the most primary truth that ministers to his self-preservation. If parents were themselves sufficiently educated, most of this knowledge might be acquired at the mother's knee; but, by the strangest perversion and misdirection of the educational forces, these most essential elements of knowledge are more neglected than any other.

School committees would summarily dismiss the teacher who should have the good sense and courage to spend three days of each week with her pupils in the fields and woods, teaching them the names, peculiarities, and uses of rocks, trees, plants, and flowers, and the beautiful story of the animals, birds, and

insects which fill the world with life and beauty. They will applaud her for continuing to perpetrate that undefended and indefensible outrage upon the laws of physical and intellectual life which keeps a little child sitting in silence, in a vain attempt to hold its mind to the words of a printed page, for six hours in a day. Herod was merciful, for he finished his slaughter of the innocents in a day; but this practice kills by the savagery of slow torture.

And what is the child directed to study? Besides the mass of words and sentences which he is compelled to memorize, not one syllable of which he understands, at eight or ten years of age he is set to work on English grammar, one of the most complex, intricate, and metaphysical of studies, requiring a mind of much muscle and discipline to master it. Thus are squandered — nay, far worse than squandered those thrice precious years when the child is all ear and eye, when its eager spirit, with insatiable curiosity, hungers and thirsts to know the what and the why of the world and its wonderful furniture. We silence its sweet clamor by cramming its hungry mind with words, words, empty, meaningless words. It asks for bread, and we give it a stone. It is to me a perpetual wonder that any child's love of knowledge survives the outrages of the schoolhouse. It would be foreign to my present purpose to consider further the subject of primary education; but it is worthy your profoundest thought, for "out of it are the issues of life." That man will be a benefactor of his race who shall teach us how to manage rightly the first years of a child's education. I, for one, declare that no child of mine shall ever be compelled to study one hour, or to learn even the English alphabet, before he has deposited under his skin at least seven years of muscle and bone.

What are our seminaries and colleges accomplishing in the way of teaching the laws of life and physical well-being? I should scarcely wrong them were I to answer, Nothing, absolutely nothing. The few recitations which some of the colleges require in anatomy and physiology unfold but the alphabet of those sciences. The emphasis of college culture does not fall there. The graduate has learned the Latin of the old maxim, Mens sana in corpore sano; but how to strengthen the mind by the preservation of the body, he has never learned. He can read you in Xenophon's best Attic Greek, that Apollo flayed

the unhappy Marsyas, and hanged up his skin as a trophy; but he has never examined the wonderful texture of his own skin, or the laws by which he may preserve it. He would blush, were he to mistake the place of a Greek accent, or put the ictus on the second syllable of Eolus; but the whole circle liberalium artium, so pompously referred to in his diploma of graduation, may not have taught him, as I can testify in an instance personally known to me, whether the jejunum is a bone, or the humerus an intestine. Every hour of study consumes a portion of his muscular and vital force. Every tissue of his body requires its appropriate nourishment, the elements of which are found in abundance in the various products of nature; but he has never inquired where he shall find the phosphates and carbonates of lime for his bones, albumen and fibrine for his blood, and phosphorus for his brain. His chemistry, mineralogy, botany, anatomy, and physiology, if thoroughly studied, would give all this knowledge; but he has been intent on things remote and foreign, and has given little heed to those matters which so nearly concern the chief functions of life. Yet the student

should not be blamed. The great men of history have set him the example. Copernicus discovered and announced the true theory of the solar system a hundred years before the circulation of the blood was known. Though from the heart to the surface, and from the surface back to the heart of every man of the race, some twenty pounds of blood had made the circuit once every three minutes, from the creation of the first man, yet men were looking so steadily away from themselves that they did not observe the wonderful fact. Man's habit of thought has developed itself in all the courses of college study.

In the next place, I inquire, What kinds of knowledge are necessary for carrying on and improving the useful arts and industries of civilized life? I am well aware of the current notion that these muscular arts should stay in the fields and shops, and not invade the sanctuaries of learning. A finished education is supposed to consist mainly of literary culture. The story of the forges of the Cyclops, where the thunderbolts of Jove were fashioned, is supposed to adorn elegant scholarship more gracefully than those sturdy truths which are preached to this generation in the wonders of the mine, in the fire of the furnace, in the clang of the iron-mill, and the other innumerable industries which, more than all other human agencies, have made our civil