Laudator Temporis Acti

John Jay Chapman (1862-1933), "The Schoolmaster," Atlantic Monthly 117 (May 1916) 650-654 (at 651-652):

The defect of American education is diffuseness. The children are bothered and confused by being dragged across the surfaces of too many studies in a day. All of our schools, both public and private, and all our universities and colleges, suffer from this same national vice, which is a vice in the American character, a weakness in our temperament. It ought to be met and corrected in every field of life.

[....]

What we need is depth. Depth can be imparted through the teaching of anything. It can be imparted through Latin grammar, through handwriting, through carpenter work, through arithmetic or history. The one element required is time. Depth cannot be imparted quickly, or in many subjects at once. Leisure is necessary, — a slowing down, a taking of things, not easily, but slowly, determinedly, patiently, — as if there were plenty of time and nothing else counted. This is the road to rapid and brilliant work, and there is no other. The smallest children should be set on this road, and guided and governed and helped and slaved over by the best of your masters. One subject understood means the world mastered. My friend, Frederick Mather of Yale, puts the thing as follows: —

'If one of our small colleges should, after the manner of the English colleges, devote itself to a few old-fashioned subjects, such as Latin and Greek, and some kind of History and Philosophy, and should really teach these things, its graduates would soon be so famous and so eminent. that banks and railroads would be clamoring for them at the college doors.'