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: Ill WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION? Is liberal education losing in power to attract youth? This is alleged in many quarters. In college and secondary school, the studies which wear a vocational aspect are being preferred, we are told, to those that minister to the larger ideals of life. Education toward practical achievement is being sought by an increasing number of students, while the numbers of those seeking in the humanities the elevating influences which a higher civilization needs do not increase proportionately. The advocates of an effective vocational education are not infrequently embarrassed by the charge that they are promoting the decay of much that makes for kindled ideal, sympathetic insight and personal culture. They have not always the hardihood to suggest that perhaps the waning of interest in liberal education may be occasioned largely by lack of adaptation in its own instruments and methods.May it not be possible that the demand for the essentials of liberal education is no less strong than formerly, but that ancient ways of meeting it no longer suffice ? Clearly, better foundations are needed for liberal education in school and college. Professors and teachers of the liberal arts still reflect in a measure the ideals and methods of the cloister and of the leisured world in which their calling found its aristocratic and exclusive origins. Quite naturally, they are usually strong in their faiths, and resentful of scrutiny into the social validity of their purposes; and it would be surprising if, under the circumstances, they proved themselves able to evaluate in any fundamental way the effectiveness of their means and methods in promoting culture and social worth under modern democratic conditions. Schoolmen — teachers of the liberal arts in school and col... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.