This phenomenon is common to all stages of progress in all sorts of things.  It is true, for instance, in the general advance of the world in civilization.  The average degree of appreciation of art among persons who know anything of art at all is less, for instance, than in the days of ancient Greece, because the class of art-lovers throughout the world is vastly larger and includes a very large number of persons whose appreciation of art is slight and crude.  There is, nevertheless, a greater total amount of love for art, and a higher average of art education, taking into account the world’s entire population, than there was then.  Let us state the case mathematically:  If, of one thousand persons, ten have a hundred dollars each and the rest nothing, a gift of five dollars each to five hundred others will raise the average amount owned by each of the thousand, but will greatly lower the average amount held by the property owners in the group, who will now number 510, instead of ten.

“How do you demonstrate all this?” will probably be asked.  I do not know of any statistical data that will enable it to be proved directly, but it is certain that education is becoming more general, which must increase the number of partly educated persons having an imperfect educational background—­a lack of ancestral training and home influence.  Thus, among the persons with whom the educated adult comes in contact, he necessarily meets a larger number of individuals than formerly who betray lack of education in speech, writing or taste; and he wrongly concludes that the schools are not doing their work properly.  If the schools were not doing their work properly, we should have direct statistical evidence of it, and all the direct evidence I have seen goes to show that the schools are accomplishing more to-day and accomplishing it by better methods, than ever before.

Similarly, I believe that the totality of teaching ability in the profession has increased.  The conspicuous failures are persons who are unfit to be teachers and who have been drafted into service because of our sudden increase in educational plant.  The result in some cases has been a curious aberration in disciplinary methods—­a freakishness that is inseparable from any sudden advance such as we are making.

Our schools can and will advance much further in personnel, methods and results; but they are by no means on the downward path now.  One way in which they may do better work is by greater appreciation of their selective as well as their training function.

Suppose we have twenty bushels of raspberries and the same quantity of potatoes to be prepared for food.  Our present educational methods are a good deal like those of a cook who should try to make the whole into either jam or Saratoga chips, or should divide the lot in some arbitrary way unrelated to their fitness for one or the other operation.  We are giving in our educational institutions many degrees and many