The Jesuits, the
Humanists, and the Natural Scientists all claimed to be liberal,
culture-giving, and preparatory to great things; yet we only need to
quote from the histories of education to show their narrowness and
incompleteness. The training of the Jesuits was linguistic and
rhetorical, and almost entirely apart from our present notion of human
development. The Humanists or Classicists who for so many centuries
constituted the educational elite, belonged to the past with its
glories rather than to the age in which they really lived. Though
standing in a modern age, they were almost blind to the great problems
and opportunities it offered. They stood in bold contrast to the
growth of the modern spirit in history, literature, and natural
science. But in spite of their predominating influence over education
for centuries, there has never been the shadow of a chance for making
the classics of antiquity the basis of common, popular education. The
modern school of Natural Scientists is just as one-sided as the
Humanists in supposing that human nature is narrow enough to be
compressed within the bounds of natural science studies, however broad
their field may be.
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