For instance, a powerful selective feature is the attractiveness of a given course of study to those who are desired to pursue it.  If we can find a way, for example, to make our high school courses attractive to those who are qualified to take them, while at the same time rendering them very distasteful to those who are not so qualified, we shall evidently have taken a step in the right direction.  It is clear that both parts of this prescription must be taken together or there is no true selection.  Much has been done of late years toward making educational courses of all kinds interesting and attractive, but it is to be feared that their attractiveness has been such as to appeal to the unfit as well as to the fit.  If we sugar-coat our pills indiscriminately and mix them with candy, many will partake who need another kind of medicine altogether.  We must so arrange things that the fit will like while the unfit dislike, and for this purpose the less sugar-coating the better.  This is no easy problem and it is intended merely to indicate it here, not to propose a general solution.

The one thing to which attention should be directed is the role that may be and is played by the printed book in selective education.  There is more or less effort to discredit books as educative tools and to lay emphasis on oral instruction and manual training.  We need not decry these, but, it must be remembered that after all the book contains the record of man’s progress; we may tell how to do a thing, and show how to do it, but we shall never do it in a better way or explain the why and wherefore, and surely transmit that ability and that explanation to posterity, without the aid of a stable record of some kind.  If we are sure that our students could and would pick out only what they needed, as a wild animal picks his food in the woods, we might go far toward solving our problem, by simply turning them loose in a collection of books.  Some people have minds that qualify them to profit by such “browsing,” and some of these have practically educated themselves in a library.  Even in the more common cases where formal training is absolutely necessary, access to other books than text-books is an aid to selection both qualitative and quantitative.  Books may serve as samples.  To take an extreme case, a boy who had no knowledge whatever of the nature of law or medicine would certainly not be competent to choose between them in selecting a profession, and a month spent in a library where there were books on both subjects would certainly operate to lessen his incompetence.  Probably it would not be rash to assert that with free access to books, under proper guidance, both before and during a course of training, the persons who begin that course will include more of the fit and those who finish it will include less of the unfit, than without such access.

Let us consider one or two concrete examples.  A college boy has the choice of several different courses.  He knows little of them, but thinks that one will meet his needs.  He elects it and finds too late that he is wasting his time.  Another boy, whose general reading has been sufficient to give him some superficial knowledge of the subject-matter in all the courses, sees clearly which will benefit him, and profits by that knowledge.