acquired fitness, but probably all will agree that training bestowed upon
the absolutely unfit is worse than useless, and that there are persons
whose natural aptitudes are so great that upon them a minimum of training
will produce a maximum effect. Such selective features as our present
educational processes possess, the examination, for instance, are mostly
exclusive; they aim to bar out the unfit rather than to attract the fit.
Here is a feature on which some attention may well be fixt.

How do these considerations affect the subject of general education? Are
we to affirm that arithmetic is only for the born mathematician and Latin
for the born linguist, and endeavor to ascertain who these may be? Not so;
for here we are training not experts but citizens. Discrimination here
must be not in the quality but in the quantity of training. We may divide
the members of any community into classes according as their formal
education--their school and college training--has lasted one, two, three,
four, or more years. There has been a selection here, but it has operated,
in general, even more imperfectly than in the case of special training.
Persons who are mentally qualified to continue their schooling to the end
of a college course, and who by so doing would become more useful members
of the community, are obliged to be content with two or three years in the
lower grades, while others, who are unfitted for the university, are kept
at it until they take, or fail to take, the bachelor's degree. An ideal
state of things, of course, would be to give each person the amount of
general education for which he is fitted and then stop. This would be
difficult of realization even if financial considerations did not so often
interfere. But at least we may keep in view the desirability of preventing
too many misfits and of insisting, so far as possible, on any selective
features that we may discover in present systems.

For instance, a powerful selective feature is the attractiveness of a