I confess the method seems to me to lean more closely to the indirect influence rather than the direct.  It is doubtful if “art” can really be taught in any sense; the inherent sense of beauty can be fostered and an inherent aptitude developed, but that is about all.  As for the building up of a non-professional passion for art I am quite sure it cannot be done, and should hardly be attempted, and very likely the same is true of the application of beauty.

Text books on “How to Understand” this art or that are interesting ventures into abstract theory, but they are little more.  We must always remember that art is a result, not a product, and that sense of beauty is a natural gift and not an accomplishment.  On the other hand, much can be accomplished by indirection, and by this I mean the buildings and the grounds and the cultural adjuncts that are offered by any school or college.  The ordinary type of school-house—­primary, grammar or high school—­is, in its barren ugliness and its barbarous “efficiency,” a very real outrage on decency, and a few Braun photographs and plaster casts and potted plants avail nothing.  Private schools and some colleges—­by no means all—­are apt to be somewhat better, and here the improvement during the last ten years has been amazing, one or two universities having acquired single buildings, or groups, of the most astonishing architectural beauty.  In no case, however, has as yet complete unity been achieved, while the arts of painting, sculpture, music and the drama, as vital and operative and pervasive influences, lag far behind, and formal religion with its liturgies and ceremonial, its constant and varied services and its fine and appealing pageantry—­religion which is the greatest vitalizing and stimulating force in beauty is hardly touched at all.

Bad art of any kind is bad anywhere, but in any type of educational institution, from the kindergarten to the post graduate college, it is worse and less excusable than it is elsewhere, unless it be in association with religion, while the absence of beauty at the instigation of parsimony or efficiency is just as bad.  I am firmly persuaded that we need, not more courses of study but more beautiful environment for scholars under instruction.

I have touched cursorily on certain elements in education which need either a new emphasis or an altogether new interpretation; religion, history, art, but this does not mean that the same treatment should not be accorded elsewhere.  There are certain studies that should be revived, such as formal logic, there are others that need immediate and complete restoration, as Latin for example, there are many, chiefly along scientific and vocational lines, that could well be minimized, or in some cases dispensed with altogether:  one might go on indefinitely on this line, however, weighing and testing studies in relation to their character-value, but certainly enough has already been said to indicate the point of view I would urge for consideration.  Before I close, however, I want to touch on two points that arise in connection with college education, if, even for the sake of argument, we admit that the primary object of all formal education is the “education” of the character-capacity in each individual.