LEARNING TO THINK
At least twelve college presidents have said to me during the last year that in their judgment the chief advantage of a college course is learning to think. It has been stated by Dr. Hamilton Wright Mabie that to Americans no conquests are possible save those which are won by superiority of ideas. Professor George H. Palmer tells an anecdote of a Harvard graduate who came back to Cambridge and called upon him to express his gratitude for certain help which had come to him in Professor Palmer’s classroom, and which had directly influenced his life. The professor, naturally elated, hastened to inquire what particular remark had so influenced the young man’s career. The graduate replied: “You told us one day that John Locke insisted on clear ideas. These two words have been transforming elements in my life and work.”
The colleges liberate every year a tremendous vital force, which is a prodigious energy. It may drive men aimlessly into all kinds of trifling, display, and doubtfully acquired possessions, or it may be harnessed to clear ideas and sturdy convictions on the great subjects of nationalism, industrialism, and enlightenment through schools and art and literature and religion. Education in the fullest meaning of the term is the source and secret of American success. Some of our colleges are older than the nation. Harvard was founded in 1636, William and Mary in 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton in 1746, all before our distinctively national life began. The colleges are the training centers of the nation’s life, and to the trained men of any nation belong increasingly the opportunities and the prizes of public life. Bismarck was sagaciously prophetic when he said that one-third of the students of Germany died because of overwork, one-third were incapacitated for leadership through dissipation, and the other third ruled Germany. The future welfare of the peoples of the earth is in the hands of the men who are being trained by the schools for service and public leadership. The power of leadership is developed in part at least by the expression of ideas in writing and speaking. President Eliot is quoted as saying that the superior effectiveness of some men lies not in their larger stock of ideas, but in their greater power of expression. Many a student has learned to give expression to his ideas and convictions, and many an editor has found his vocation, by writing for the college journals.
Editors of the Harvard Lampoon, making up the “Dummy” of a Number