It is common knowledge that business affairs do not require more than ten pages of arithmetic and it would seem only fair that the study of the other pages should be justified.  These other pages must serve some useful purpose in the thinking of those who retain them, and, certainly, no harm would ensue from a revelation of this purpose.  If they are studied as a means to some high end, they will prove no less important after this fact has been explained.  We may need more arithmetic than we have, but it is our due to be informed why we need it; to what use it is to be put.  These things we have a right to know, and no superintendent, who is charged with the responsibility of making the course of study, has a right to withhold the information.  If he does not know the explanation of the course of study he has devised, he ought to make known that fact and throw himself “on the mercy of the court.”

In these days of conservation and elimination of waste every subject that seeks admission to the course of study should be challenged at the door and be made to show what useful purpose it is to serve.  Nor should any subject be admitted on any specious pretext.  If there are subjects that are better adapted to the high purposes of education than the ones we are now using, then, by all means, let us give them a hearty welcome.

Above all, we should be careful not to retain a subject unless it has a more valid passport than old age to justify its retention.  If Chinese will help us win the goal of appreciation more effectively than Latin, then, by all means, we should make the substitution.  But, in doing so, we must exercise care not to be carried away by a yearning for novelty.  Least of all should any subject be admitted to the course of study that does not have behind it something more substantial and enduring than whim or caprice.

The subjects that avail in generating and stimulating the growth of appreciation are many and of great variety.  Nor are they all found in the proverbial course of study of the schools.  When the boy first really sees an ear of corn from another viewpoint than the economic, he finds it eloquent of the marvelous adaptations of nature.  From being a mere ear of corn it becomes a revelation of design and beauty.  No change has taken place in the ear of corn, but a most important change has been wrought in the boy.  Such a change is so subtle, so delicate, and so intangible that it cannot be measured in terms of per cents; but it is no less real for all that.  It is a spiritual process and, therefore, aptly illustrates the accepted definition of education.  Though it defies analysis and the rule of thumb, the boy is conscious of it and can say with the man who was born blind, “One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see,” and no cabalistic marks in a grade-book can express the value of the change indicated by that statement.