The Assault on Humanism - Livres de poche

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II I expect to develop these obvious but indispensable topics in a separate paper. There is no reason why I should interrupt the present argument with this detail. The work has been done. This is not a new question to be debated in vacua. Indeed, my chief complaint against the assailants of Latin is their inac- quaintance with, or their deliberate suppression of, the considerable literature in which these suggestions are worked out with discriminating specific arguments and concrete illustrations. Some years ago I debated a similar question with President Eliot at the meeting of the Association of American Universities. He paid no attention to my paper at the time, and he now writes in the Atlantic in total disregard of the entire literature of the subject. I do not mean merely that he suppresses the bibliography and the mention of names: I mean that he neglects distinctions that have been pertinently drawn, ignores challenges that have been, presented again and again, and reiterates without qualification fallacies that have repeatedly been exploded. In this President Eliot conforms to the general practice or policy of opponents of Latin and writers on pedagogy. They either have not read the literature which they controvert, or they intentionally ignore it. They do not inform their readers of its existence, and they do not even tacitly amend their own arguments to meet its specific contentions. In controversy this is what Lincoln called 'bushwhacking.' In the authors of textbooks of the science or the history of education it is the abandonment of the scientific for the frankly partisan attitude. The third volume of Professor Graves's History of Education emphasizes throughout Herbert Spencer's well-known essay and quotes considerable passages from it and from Huxley. It d...