Word: systemics
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...Ruskin's system accomplishes the first of these things, it is able to do some good at least; for, in all probability, our old ideas are wrong. And why should we not study art systematically? If I place a picture of Albert Durer's before an ignorant person, he will doubtless feel none of the beauty which is certainly there. Nor will my saying to him, "This is a beautiful picture," do good. We must all have education in art, as well as in everything else requiring knowledge and judgment; and, in my opinion, this education is best secured...
This, too, is the system that should be followed in teaching the classics. If the students in these days, as our author says they used to do, came to college, after four or five years of careful preparation, with a sufficient knowledge of the grammatical principles, the drill he objects to would be perhaps superfluous. But do they come so prepared? Most enter college with a knowledge of only the easiest works of all classical literature, such as Caesar, Virgil, Xenophon, and are here saddled with Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Horace. They have all they can do, with the help...
...allowing those in the later years of college to study as seems most advantageous to themselves, would also fail. For the latter would bring an entirely new element into the experiment; that is, it would rouse in nearly all the students a sense of responsibility, without which no system can be satisfactory or endurable; while the former, though benefiting one class, - those, however, who have already the sense of responsibility, - would, by contrast, make restraint all the more burdensome, and strengthen that antagonism between teachers and their pupils which is the bane of college, academy, and school...
...glimmering of its nature may be derived from the following sentence: "Perhaps there is something in the nature of the classics (for it is in the men who have to do with these that we notice chiefly a tendency to Johnsonian faults) which, when it has impregnated the human system, works upon the internal organization of its victim, and finally culminates in a morbid sensitiveness in regard to the musty languages of the ancients, which, whenever any unlucky student fails to comprehend the manifold beauties of some brain-racking passage, breaks out into an ungovernable passion, and vents itself...
MUCH attention has been called, during the past eight or ten months, on the part of the newspapers, to the changes in agitation at Harvard. Some have censured, some approved, the liberality of the University Officers in taking such bold steps toward their universally accorded aim, a University system similar to Oxford or Cambridge...