THE PA. STATE DISCUSSIONS IN EDUCATIONGE BY FRANCIS A. WALKER, PH.D., LL.D. Late President Massachusetts Institute of Technology 617 EDITOR'S PREFACE. THE collection into a volume of the following addresses and papers relating to education is in accordance with the expressed intention of the late President Walker. That the work should be done by an editor instead of by the author is but another of the countless losses suffered through his untimely death. Although, while at Yale University, he had rendered admirable service to the schools both of the State of Connecticut and of the city of New Haven, the fact that no paper dealing with the subject appeared earlier than 1884, when General Walker was in middle life, indicates that questions of education had not engaged his attention, to the point of a formal discussion of them, until after he assumed the Presidency of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1881. Indeed, so much deeper had been his study of other social questions, that, while exhibiting the deepest interest in matters relating to education, he disclaimed any special or technical knowledge concerning them. That, however, he was an educator in the highest and best sense of this much-abused term is amply shown by his brilliant and altogether satisfactory administration, during the last fifteen years of his life, of the Institute of Technology, and by his admirable treatment of the special topics in education with which this volume deals. Bred in one of what he himself calls the "old-fash iii |