Bring Back the Liberal Arts

1

WE ALL applaud those patriotic presidents of colleges who, under the spur of the emergency, are turning their institutions into training schools. Liberal Education, though retiring discreetly for the moment, is expected to return with a new vigor, arm in arm with Victory. But should our boys, who are fighting for freedom, have no chance to fortify themselves with those studies that prepare men to be free? Psychological preparation has been employed as a deadly weapon by our enemy. We reckon ill if we neglect it in fighting down their tyranny.

In the political and social realm, the leaders of our government and those of Great Britain and many private groups are working quietly on plans ensuring the welfare of the world after the war. We shall not secure the unconditional surrender of our enemies and then assemble to debate the next step, only to be bogged in endless argument and ultimate frustration. We are thinking out that next step now. We are thinking mainly in political and economic terms. So far so good. But sound government and decent relations in society at home and abroad and in world trade must rest on the firm base of right ideals and right education. By this I mean a liberal education. And what, pray, is that?

The essence of a liberal education, like many another good thing, was invented by Plato and the Greeks and developed by Cicero and the Romans. The liberal arts, artes liberates, were those appropriate for a free man — not only socially free, but free in mind. They were also the artes humanae, those that developed the essential faculties of man as man. That is what humanism means to Cicero. In his time the number of the Arts was not precisely fixed, though they comprised at least the sacred seven that later ages knew as the Trivium of Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic, and the Quadrivium of Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music.

Cicero speaks of “the arts that are called liberal and noble — geometry, music, the knowledge of literature and poetry, and the subjects that treat the science of nature, human character and customs, and public affairs.” Grammar meant not merely the elements of a language, but “ a study of the poets, a knowledge of history, an interpretation of words and the right intonation in delivery.” Rhetoric, a byword and a hissing, at least in our Eastern colleges at the present time, involved a most minute training for the orator in the art of argument, of literary composition, and of public speaking; it was indispensable for the courtroom and the Senate, in both of which an element of the theater prevailed. The crown of the liberal program was Philosophy, “the mother of the Arts.” “The theory and the practice of all the Arts that point out the right way of life are embraced in the study of philosophy.” The philosopher is defined as “one who seeks to know the inner force, the nature and the causes of all things human and divine, and to comprehend and to follow the whole right way of living.”

Why did this broad system of education last down the ages? How would it enliven us today, if only we would free it from the mummy swathes which we have woven about it?

First we see in the ancient program the germ of many if not most of the subjects that are offered in college today. Grammar and rhetoric are liberal and elastic disciplines. Science is not restricted to astronomy but includes any inquiry into the evolution of natural phenomena — for that is what Cicero’s term de naturis rerum implies. Philosophy gathers under its wings not only theology and psychology but economics, sociology, and all the adventures of a truth-seeking mind. This wealth of material naturally was subdivided in the course of time. The ancient tree of learning did not fail to grow; it put forth new branches and new fruit. We have made the mistake of not allowing the learner to see the tree for the branches; and we boost him into some upper branch to make his little nest there.

The ancient plan was adaptable. As we follow its course down the centuries we note that while its essence remains the same, its contents were adjusted to the intellectual temper of the different ages. Thus in the thirteenth century, when the recovery of the real Aristotle gave a fresh impulse to speculative thought, the longing to harmonize ancient philosophy and Christian teaching became the ruling passion of the age, and received a comprehensive and ultimate treatment in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. There was a battle between Dialectic and Literature, between Paris and Orleans, and yet the Arts remained as the basis of education. In the Renaissance, when the full wealth of Greek literature was again revealed and scholasticism quietly faded into the background and experimental science by slow stages came into its own, the Arts were still the starting point for the new advance. Similarly in the new colony on Massachusetts Bay, Harvard College was founded not primarily as a divinity school, but as a house of humanism, brought over from the elder Cambridge because it was indispensable for pastors and statesmen alike. The Arts made the world safe for Puritanism.

The program of the Arts was adaptable, but it preserved its integrity. It marched down the centuries like a Roman legion, conquering chaos with order. Cicero in more than one place dwells on that “common bond” that binds together those “noble and liberal” arts that form the human way of life. This truth, as he declares, had been proclaimed by Plato. In our day there has been a fatal tendency to speak of “the humanities,” meaning literature, art, music, and philosophy, as a. field dissociate from science; that would be news — unwelcome and ununderstandable news — to Plato and Cicero and Virgil. Let us hope that it is a passing phase. Speaking before the New York Academy of Public Education, President Conant emphasized the interrelation that exists, and that ought to be more clearly recognized, between science and the political and social organization of a nation. That is a move in the right direction. In A Fighting Faith, Mr. Conant glances back at the Harvard of President Dunster’s days as a period that may seem “as remote as prehistoric man. Yet viewed from another angle, the long interval of time appears to vanish.” So it does if that backward glance is extended to the civilization of the Greeks and the Romans. That common experience which our students in college now crave existed then both in education and in national life. What has chronology to do with the perennial values?

2

THERE are several misconceptions of this ancient program of the Arts, of which our colleges preserve only the title today. One is that it represented the omne scibile, all that was known and all that could be known. We look back with an amused condescension at the supposed complacency of the doctors of the Middle Ages or the A.B.’s of Colonial times, who carried away with them all learning in one small sheepskin. No fancy could be more grotesque. Not all the Classical authors were read, but a selection from the best. Not all history was scanned. Not all that was known, or thought to be known, about the natural world was squeezed into a nutshell.

To the Middle Ages the allegorical interpretation of the world and all that is therein was a science that occupied many minds. So did astrology, which was not all superstition but rather the “higher” astronomy, in that it did not merely describe the firmament but traced the laws governing the relations of the heavenly bodies to our corporeal “humors.” The world of Chaucer, as John Livingston Lowes has delightfully shown in his book on that poet, was quite as complex intellectually as our own. There are plenty of novelties with which we must bother our heads nowadays, but, thank God, there are as many more that we no longer have to know. And yet, though the science of one age may later seem quaint, it once was science; and here we may cite another golden little book, Henry Osborn Taylor’s Fact: the Romance of Mind.

The purpose of education was a matter for constant debate in the Harvard Commencement theses of the first century of the College’s existence. Not once is the idea expressed that the Arts embraced all knowledge. Instead it is declared that their object is to train the mind to think, and the tongue to speak — not so bad for the seventeenth century, and not an unworthy goal for education today.

Another misconception is that the Classics — in the familiar cliche — acted as a “strangle-hold” on education. They were indeed an integral part of the plan of the Arts, but they were not the whole plan. They furnished the foundation for grammar, history, literature, and rhetoric, and with mathematics and science and logic led up to the final year, in which the formal teaching of them disappeared; philosophy then had the controlling hand and garnered the fruits from all the various fields.

Science survived the Classics in the Senior year, for its spirit of free inquiry was the life of philosophy. Rhetoric survived them, for the training of the tongue to speak followed the Senior till his parting day.

It is exciting to compare the programs of study in the years preceding the advent of the Elective System under President Eliot and to note how the ancient program, true in its outlines to its seventeenth-century model, gained constantly in richness and variety. In 1820, Seniors at Harvard studied mathematics and chemistry, astronomy, political economy, political, moral, and intellectual philosophy, declamation, forensics, and themes. In 1830, optics, mineralogy, and anatomy replaced chemistry, which had figured in the Junior year. Modern languages have made their appearance, and one of the textbooks is Rawle on the Constitution of the United States. The learning of the past was focused on the present.

One of the minds subjected to the “strangle-hold of the Classics” was that of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a member of the Harvard Class of 1829. He therefore lived through the very regime at which we have just glanced. The Classics deeply impressed him; they became part of his mental make-up. But he never complains of their claws about his throat. He found friends and playmates among the old authors, of whom Horace, obviously, was dearest to his heart.

The quality of Holmes’s wit was akin to that of Horace. His poem on “Contentment” in the Autocrat is a burlesque of Horatian sentiment that Horace would have enjoyed, since he had a similar inability to take himself too seriously. Holmes was a member of that club of English-speaking writers — Fielding and Lamb and Thackeray and Austin Dobson and various contributors to Punch from Thackeray’s day to this — which Horace, as its founder, was pleased invisibly to attend. Holmes remained faithful to Horace to the end. In a letter to John Osborne Sargent, written a few years before his death, Holmes objected to “the screeching rhymsters” and “clamorous essayists” of the day; he called for “something always by me, calm, settled beyond cavilling criticism, — a cool, clear draught of Falernian that has been somewhere near two thousand years in the cellar. ”

It has been charged that the old-fashioned education in which the Classics “dominated” was aristocratic, intended for young gentlemen “ born to the purple.” Let the great unwashed keep out! Of course the Arts produced aristocrats. Initiates into this most select of clubs made friends with Homer and Plato and Sophocles and Thucydides and Virgil and Cicero and Horace and Tacitus and through them to others of the Four Hundred of literature and art and music and science all down the centuries. Did not such an experience indicate an advance in the hierarchy of values? Had not the members of such a society climbed to the topmost class? But the ancients, no less than good Catholics or great people of any generation, condemned superbia as the most deadly, and the most comical, of the seven deadly sins.

In his introduction to Sargent’s Horatian Echoes, Oliver Wendell Holmes calls Horace, among other pleasant titles, “a refined, genial, clear-sighted, thoroughbred Roman gentleman.” In a copy of that book possessed by Harvard College Library, some higher critic, in the spirit of the teetotaler who emended Holmes’s “Convivial Ode,” has scratched out “thoroughbred Roman gentleman” and substituted “son of a freedman.” And so he was — and so he was not. He began most humbly; his father had once been a slave. But thanks to his merits, his geniality, and the lessons he had received from his father, Horace made his way quickly to the topmost level of society. He was the intimate friend of his patron Maecenas, he was well-nigh a brother to Virgil, the foremost poet of the day, and with these two he gave sound counsel, in the form of a “ mirror of the prince,” to Augustus, the ruler of the Roman state. Augustus begged him to become his confidential secretary. But Horace preferred his independence. He had indeed become a “ thoroughbred Roman gentleman,” aristocratic in his tastes and his conduct; but he had no relish for the enslaving round of social conventions to which nobility was subject.

Had he the choice to live his life over again, Horace declares, he would select no other parents than those that gave him birth. Horace never forgot his debt to that good father who gave his all that his boy might have a fair start in life. Horace’s varied poetry is a monument “more lasting than bronze” of a career of advancement in which a democratic and humane spirit went hand in hand with aristocratic achievement. Our country is by no means unique in opening free pathways from log cabin to White House. Imperial Rome can still give lessons in social mobility.

3

WHY did the ancient program of the Liberal Arts break down when it ran full tilt against the Elective System? The new idea did not spring full-armed from President Eliot’s brain; it came forth from new conditions at his bidding. He built on tendencies that had been slowly and surely forming in the decades preceding his regime. The ancient tree of learning had become top-heavy with numerous new branches. The modern languages of Europe, each with a noble literature, clamored for more room. Science had begun to unfold in astounding inventions and new specialties. Changes in society and industry enriched and broadened the economic field. Philosophy, once the summation of the Arts, now seemed more like an observer of the stream of scientific progress, too swift for its control. Not all these developments were in their vigor when President Eliot wrote his famous article in the Atlantic in 1869, but the start had been made and he foresaw the outcome.

His remedy was to upset the hierarchy of the Arts and to put all academic subjects on a democratic level. Free field and no favor. Let the best art win. Liberié, égalité — fraternité? They are brothers in the common search for truth, but each pursues its own path. They do not make up a harmonious team as before. With the subjects required for admission to college virtually unchanged, the Arts in their incipient stages still flourished in the schools, and some of the old prescriptions still lingered in the college; even in the nineties we still had “Forensics” in the Junior year, though that was but the ghost of ancient Rhetoric.

Those of us who were in college in those days had no doubt that we were enjoying a liberal education. We were free to wander in whatever field invited. Freedom was President Eliot’s watchword. We felt that despite the diversity in the feast of learning that tempted us to different dishes, we were sitting at the same table. Besides those courses to which we flocked by order, there were some that attracted most of us by the magic of the teacher’s name. It was the golden age of Harvard Indifference, Horace’s admirari, both terms susceptible of comical misinterpretations, and both meaning the same thing — not snobbishness, but independence flavored with Socratic irony. Moreover, since a good foundation, if not the full program of the Arts, had been provided in the schools, we came into the Freshman Class after a common experience, though gained in different places. We all presented the same certificates of sound tests duly passed. We all had earned the badge of Harvard.

In one respect the Elective System weakened the student’s initiative. Under the old regime the Classics did not sit heavily on the modern languages, as though they were upstarts, novi homines, whom the old families sought to teach their place. Holmes, for instance, studied French and Italian and some Spanish at college before, in his beloved Paris and his worshiped Rome, two of these languages became living tongues to him. The acquisition of Latin was of course a great help. Acquaintance with the Classical masterpieces led naturally to a wider and more intelligent reading of the modern literatures, including our own. Shakespeare was not available in a course, but he was not proscribed.

Besides all this, lads of any intellectual curiosity had always devoured books and did not cease to read outside their courses. James Russell Lowell, when wearied with Conic Sections, turned to Aeschylus; and those who were balked by Aeschylus could seek refuge in Shakespeare. Such diversions did not disappear under the Elective System, but they were progressively on a lower plane. For it follows by a law of nature that the more authors you put into courses, the fewer will be left to lead us into temptation. How can Congreve guide us down the primrose path when he becomes the subject of English 543, “with some consideration of his sources and his influence”? A new kind of strangle-hold resulted. The college catalogue with its plethoric outlay of courses, swelling from year to year, became a sacred Summa Academica, the very sight of which inculcated in Freshmen the awesome dogma that, like the Koran, the Catalogue contains all knowledge and that any apparent information without its covers is but pale illusion and that therefore the only way to know anything is to take a course in it. Some of us were inhibited by the very bounties of the banquet from devising menus of our own.

There were other and more serious faults in the Elective System — overspecialization and the opposite vice of hunting the pleasant paths of least resistance. These defects were remedied by President Lowell’s no less great reform. His plan of Concentration and Distribution, with its designation of four essential fields which all must enter, was to this extent a return to the old program of the Arts. But since these fields were themselves divided into numerous plots, the very portion of the new system that was intended to give breadth and general interest to the special or concentrated part ensured it for the individual rather than for the group. And when at the beginning of President Conant’s administration the Faculty took the pith out of Distribution, only the fields of Concentration had real significance; that meant, as we have seen, the training of specialists in this or that. Only those who had chosen the same field enjoyed the common life. One of those evils of the Elective System at which President Lowell had aimed had become intensified. Under President Eliot one might specialize; now one must. No more roaming and feasting of the soul with rare adventure.

I am no foe of specialization — in its place; it is the life of science and progress. But a general and common and liberal program must precede it. It should be recognized that, ever since the Elective System came in, education at Harvard and the other colleges that adopted the Elective System has been a cross between our ancestral English college and the German university. Indeed President Eliot was credited with making a German university out of our provincial college. His great, indubitable achievement was to establish the Graduate School, following in the wake of Johns Hopkins. The Graduate School has flourished and added enormously to the international prestige of Harvard. The benefit for Harvard College is more dubious. In Germany, as in France, an introductory school, Gymnasium or lycec, had furnished an excellent liberal training, to which our high school could hardly pretend. What it had offered might be continued in college — or it might not.

Moreover, at the end of the past century, a step was taken that led to the dissolution of that common experience which Freshmen in the college had shared in the schools. The entering wedge was the abolishment of Greek as a prescribed subject for admission. It became optional. Old-fashioned masters might descant on the glory that was Greece, but clear-eyed youngsters, backed by practical parents, to whom “Greek had done no good,” asked simply, “Do I have to?” The only answer was, “No, you do not.”

Into the gap rushed easier and broader subjects, supposed to be more immediately related to American life and to success in the struggle for existence. With the softening of admission requirements in other ways and with the growing tendency to accept the certificates of the schools, the schools began to develop their own programs. Entrance Latin has gone the way of Greek in most of the colleges except Harvard and the Catholic institutions. In some regions of our country, mathematics and foreign languages have proved quite as vulnerable. Here is another breach in the fortress of the Arts, through which new subjects penetrate the schools. Many colleges have found it expedient to introduce elementary Greek and now are beginning to add elementary Latin. There is still a chance for a Classical education within the colleges, though with far less of the distance traversed at the end of the Senior year. In short, the colleges now have taken on courses that belong to the schools, and the schools have developed courses that belong in the colleges. This is a part of our present chaos in education.

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THE remedy consists in devising a program of courses that will ensure a common experience in liberal studies. That means, to my way of thinking, a return to the Liberal Arts. It is a pity that instead of a revolution, like the Elective System, the Arts were not continued in that evolution which we have noted in their agelong course. However, no tears over shed milk. The present moment may be even more auspicious than that which President Eliot faced. For we are brought sharply face to face with the necessity of reform by the exigencies of the present war. The plan must be thought out by school and college working in conjunction for a common end.

We might at least begin with the subjects formerly required for admission to college and keep to them for our framework. They are Greek, Latin, mathematics, science, French, German, history, English. I will leave the experts to determine the necessary constituents of each of these subjects. They might be attempered to the pupil’s abilities and his rational desires. But not one of them should be omitted, and examinations should be set in them all. There are of course exceptional cases of young geniuses in mathematics whose heads seem impervious to Greek and Latin, or Classical prodigies who can do nothing in geometry but translate pons asinorum. The Committees on Admission in colleges should deal wisely with such cases or at least admit the exceptions as special students. But for the vast majority the rules should be maintained.

I have no quarrel with principals of schools for making their programs attractive and practical and up-to-date; that is what the Liberal Arts, if presented by good teachers, have always been. But with the restoration of Greek and the new emphasis on the other tough subjects, Latin and mathematics and science, some of the innovations are bound to go. We need first of all those uncompromising disciplines which distinguish right from wrong, fact from fancy, Yes from No. A wave of theory has gone over our country — happily it seems now to be subsiding — in favor of “ childcentered” education. Protagoras must yield to the new humanism, or puerism. Not man but the child is the measure of all things. The teacher becomes his tailor, fitting him with a mental suit of clothes. Of course

No modern said that, but old Juvenal, though not in behalf of a child-centered education.

Maxima debetur puero reverentia,

a precept given by Juvenal to those immoral parents who should consider what their children think of them, may be pertinently quoted against the advocates of a child-centered scheme.

The boy has dignity. He is alive to the failings of his master, but is ready to follow him through thick and thin if the master too is human. Boys do not like to be guinea pigs, even ideal guinea pigs. They want to learn and they will learn if they see that the master knows what is what, will stand no nonsense, and yet acts towards them as man to man, as boy to boy, as father to son. They will bow to a kindly authority.

Now the old-time disciplines help to produce just that relation between teacher and pupil. There is no nonsense about Greek and Latin or mathematics or science. You either get it or you don’t. The inclination of the young mind is not to pamper itself with the idea that it is original and that its first duty is self-expression before it has something to express. The seeds of originality are within it, and every time that those seeds bear fruit, the master should not fail to commend and stimulate. But the first task is to understand. Says Mr. Santayana, one of the most critical minds that ever visited our shores: “My happiness lay in understanding the ancients (or thinking I understood them) rather than in contradicting them.” Humility is the beginning of wisdom; the meek shall inherit the earth.

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IT IS often said that a year or two of Greek or Latin is time wasted, because the beauties of Greek and Latin literature cannot be revealed in that time. That is all wrong. Just one year of Greek or Latin may be made a revelation, a turning point in life. I will not rehearse the familiar arguments for studying those so-called dead languages. Their life leaps forth if they are entrusted to the proper hands. When George Lyman Kittredge taught Latin at Exeter, boys stood on their chairs in eagerness to show they had the right answer.

I had not the good luck to be one of Kittredge’s boys, but something similar I did see in Paris not many years ago — in fact it was the best teaching I have ever seen. It was at a famous school for girls, the College de Sevigne. The subject was elementary Latin. The teacher was a young woman fair-and-twenty. Her pretty face, her gay smile, the exquisite taste of her simple dress, were prepossessing; and, as Meredith has it, “And she was French.” She also could teach. The class numbered between forty and fifty — too many according to what we generally are told. She managed them. There were no dull eyes or yawning mouths in that room. There she sat in graceful majesty, as though she were presiding over an assembly of philosophers. On the questions she propounded — is it dative or ablative? why is the subjunctive used? — hung the grave issues of life. When some unfortunate stammered the wrong answer, a score of lips cried “Aw!” and hands were, not raised, but shot out at the teacher by those who had it right.

That is the beginning. Bit by bit the delicacies of the Latin language will unfold — its imperial brevity, its art of effecting nice emphases and climax by the position of its inflected forms, its sweetness and sonorous music. When President Neilson in a recent article speaks of the illogical and “indeterminate” character of Cicero’s Latin, really he must have some other language in mind, unless the Printer’s Devil has played him an uncommonly diabolical trick.

Now the textbook used in that French class was simple; no cluttering pictures to distract the mind or tempt the pencil to further decoration; just Latin; and that’s enough. Even in the first year, some extracts might have the flavors of great literature. No lengthy exposition will descant on them and trail them in the dust. A word here, a word there, will show that the teacher detected their quality too, and being well-read in all the authors, he will promise his pupils now and then some of the good things they have in store. With such a year behind him, even if the pupil has no chance for more, he will be able, when driven by Milton to Virgil or by Chaucer to Ovid in later days, to track out with the help of a translation the secrets of the original, which no translation alone could have shown him.

But enough of details. One thing I would make clear. Though school and college should coöperate in a common plan, it is essential that the school, while leading up to college, should preserve the integrity of its own program. It is a stage in the ascent, but it likewise marks a finished achievement, in which it takes a rightful pride. No less than the college, it is a stepping-off place into life. Along with the liberal studies, it may retain the high diversions of art and music and pictured talks on ancient or modern life that it offers now; but these are diversions and not the educational backbone.

Above all, the schools are better fitted to solve a problem that most American colleges have apparently abandoned as insoluble — the place of religion in education. For Catholic institutions, whether schools or colleges, there is no problem; each day dawns with Holy Mass. In most other schools attendance is required at morning chapel. In Protestant colleges, save for the two or three who are gathered in religion’s name, few students are taught to feel that religion is an intimate part of their training; still less, that learning will be most fruitful if it consecrates its fruits at the Altar.

6

Now let us be audacious, in case I have not already been audacious enough. The program of the Liberal Arts is not completed in the schools. College remains, and here two years suffice to round that program out. There will be a slaughter of various elementary courses, which will become the prerogative of the schools. No harm in that — they often are better taught in the schools than in the colleges. The second of the two years, like the last year in the Colonial college or in Oxford Greats, will be devoted mainly to modern history and philosophy or science — something modern for one to survey in the light of the past.

Harvard’s degree of Scientiae Baccalaureus, that nightmare of logicians, which Dean Briggs once defined as an ignorance of Latin, will expire of itself when Latin is no more ignored. There will be a tombstone with the inscription: —

That will suffice for eulogy. Furthermore there will be no more concentration in specialties, since a liberal education will have been concentrated in the Arts. Is there any reason why at the end of these two years the student may not be granted his A.B.? None whatever. President Hutchins is right, though his survey courses are all wrong. The degree at the end of two years would lead at once to the Law School or the Medical or any of the graduate schools. Two years of a man’s preparation would thus be spared. Yes, and two years more. For the schools would have recovered those two lost years in American education by beginning two years earlier; a student would receive his A.B. at the age of eighteen. And the Arts would be fortressed, come peace, come war; a liberal education would always precede induction.

This means the disruption of college? By no means. The four years of the present program would remain, but the last two would now be crowned with the Master of Arts, an ancient Colonial degree given long before the Graduate School came into sight. It would be a real degree, as it is not now. Now it is absorbed incidentally on the way to the Ph.D. When the Arts are restored, it would be given for concentration in a special field just as the A.B. is awarded at Harvard now, but for a more intelligent kind of concentration on the background of a liberal education that deserves the name.

Would the College Class, bulwark of the colleges, be disrupted? Perish the thought. I am not pleading for a classless college. Supposing that the great reform should commend itself to the governing boards of our colleges instanter, a lad who enters, let us say, in the fall of 1918 would be a member of the Class of 1952. Though he would win his A.B. in 1950, he might have the award postponed till 1952, whether he stayed to win his A.M. or, by grim necessity, went elsewhere. I call it grim necessity, since he would thus forfeit the high prize offered by those last years. For then he would gain a grip on the history of human achievement that would serve him well in business or in any of the professions or in the scholarly investigations of the Graduate School.

A word on the war. We need not consider the proposal that a number of students of high grade be selected to pursue a liberal education and study the future make-up of the world while their less gifted friends are fighting to save our country in the jungles of New Guinea or the sands of North Africa. First let us know the sort of liberal education this would be. I am arguing not merely for the preservation of the liberal education that we have, but for the return of the Liberal Arts. If that can be brought about, all students would be liberally educated at the draft age. They would be especially well prepared to face the new problems ahead by knowing what Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides and Cicero and Livy and many more had had to say on the same or similar questions. For in many ways the modern world is mirrored in antiquity. And neither our colleges nor our schools would have to shut up shop or turn into training camps before the draft age. And the Muses would have emerged from the selva oscura.

Does all this seem wild fancy? Think it over. It needs to be thought out. Many a devoted specialist will have put large-sized question marks along the margins of this paper, especially in its closing section. Let us have his doubts and queries. Above all, let some schoolmaster demonstrate that it is perfectly possible (or impossible) to begin the secondary school course two years earlier. We must begin with the foundation and build up, not with the roof and build down.

Setting back the hands of the clock, gentle reader? No, winding it up.