He abandons the study and by doing so eliminates an unfit person.  A boy who has no head for figures enters a business college.  He can not get his diploma, and the community is spared one bad bookkeeper.  Certainly in some instances, possibly in all, technical and professional schools that are noted for the excellence of their product are superior not so much because they have better methods of training, but because their material is of better quality, owing to selection exercised either purposely, or automatically, or perhaps by some chance.  The same is true of colleges.  Of two institutions with the same curriculum and equally able instructors, the one with the widest reputation will turn out the best graduates because it attracts abler men from a wider field.  This is true even in such a department as athletics.  To him that hath shall be given.  This is purely an automatic selective effect.

It would appear desirable to dwell more upon selective features in educational training, to ascertain what they are in each case and how they work, and to control and dispose them with more systematic care.  Different minds will always attach different degrees of importance to natural and acquired fitness, but probably all will agree that training bestowed upon the absolutely unfit is worse than useless, and that there are persons whose natural aptitudes are so great that upon them a minimum of training will produce a maximum effect.  Such selective features as our present educational processes possess, the examination, for instance, are mostly exclusive; they aim to bar out the unfit rather than to attract the fit.  Here is a feature on which some attention may well be fixt.

How do these considerations affect the subject of general education?  Are we to affirm that arithmetic is only for the born mathematician and Latin for the born linguist, and endeavor to ascertain who these may be?  Not so; for here we are training not experts but citizens.  Discrimination here must be not in the quality but in the quantity of training.  We may divide the members of any community into classes according as their formal education—­their school and college training—­has lasted one, two, three, four, or more years.  There has been a selection here, but it has operated, in general, even more imperfectly than in the case of special training.  Persons who are mentally qualified to continue their schooling to the end of a college course, and who by so doing would become more useful members of the community, are obliged to be content with two or three years in the lower grades, while others, who are unfitted for the university, are kept at it until they take, or fail to take, the bachelor’s degree.  An ideal state of things, of course, would be to give each person the amount of general education for which he is fitted and then stop.  This would be difficult of realization even if financial considerations did not so often interfere.  But at least we may keep in view the desirability of preventing too many misfits and of insisting, so far as possible, on any selective features that we may discover in present systems.