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The failure of the schools to hold the children gave educators who recognized the artificial character of school curricula, their best reason for introducing matter relating to industrial life. The children's preference was indeed a valuable indication where reality or real subject matter would be found.
Studium may be distinguished from sacerdotium by mediaeval writers; but the students of a mediaeval university are all 'clergy', and the curricula of mediaeval universities are essentially clerical. All knowledge, it is true, falls within their scope; but every branch of knowledge, from dialectic to astronomy, is studied from the same angle, and for the same object ad maiorem Dei gloriam.
It is a dark problem; but it seems to me that we are only saved from disaster, in our well-meant efforts, by the simple fact that we cannot make humanity what we so short-sightedly desire to make it; that the dull, uninspired, unambitious element has an endurance and a permanence which we cannot change if we would, and which it is well for us that we cannot change; and that in spite of our curricula and schedules, mankind marches quietly upon its way to its unknown goal.
Two weeks or two months in camp, they are too valuable to be wasted in loafing, cigarette smoking, card playing or shooting craps. To make a camp a profitable thing there must needs be instruction; not formal but informal instruction. This is a partial list of the subject in the camp curricula. A model scout camp programme is given here.
One can imagine the joy with which girls, largely nourished on the husks which constitute most of the educational curricula of boys, will turn to a series of lectures on Child Psychology, that deal with the general course of mental development in the child, with interest and attention, the processes of learning, mental fatigue and adolescence.
Whilst the various types of Secondary School must fashion their curricula according to the nature of the services for which they prepare, we must not forget that the school has other duties to perform than the mere preparation for the social services by which a man hereafter earns his living.
George Silsbee was likewise of our party; he was an American of the Brahman type, a child of Cambridge and Boston, a man of means, and an indefatigable traveller. He had the delicate health and physique of the American student of those days, when out-door life and games made no part of our scholastic curricula.
All recognize the vital necessity of having modern school plants, well-qualified and adequately compensated teachers, and of using the best possible teaching techniques and curricula. We cannot be complacent about educating our youth. But the route to better trained minds is not through the swift administration of a Federal hypodermic or sustained financial transfusion.
It is a protest against the general assumption that the curricula of schools must be of a more or less uniform pattern, and puts an end to the absurdity of the central authority prescribing subjects to be taught in all elementary schools, regardless of varying circumstances or the possibility of improved methods of teaching.
But the "auxiliary sciences" are now taught everywhere more or less adequately; they have been introduced into the university curricula. On the other hand, students' handbooks of epigraphy, palæography, diplomatic, and so forth, have multiplied during the last twenty-five years.
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