LIFE-WORK PROPAGANDA
It is, moreover, time for constructive action on the part of both college and alumni in the matter of directing students to their proper calling. While it is impossible for our colleges to make great men out of indifferent raw material, it is possible to assist undergraduates to discover their inherent bent or capacity. Until the student has made such a discovery, the elective system which is now general in our American institutions is something of a farce. The lazy student, undecided in his vocation, uses it as a barricade through which he wriggles and twists to his degree, or at best is tempted in a dozen various directions, selecting disconnected subjects, in no one of which he finds his chief aptitude. The elective system to such a student is an art-gallery without a key, a catalogue without the pictures. He does not know what he wishes to see.
The Arch between the Dormitory Quadrangle and the Triangle, University of Pennsylvania
This undergraduate ability or inclination is not easily grasped either by himself or by others. It requires study and discriminating sympathy, to extricate a main desire from many incidental likings. Frequently the desire itself must be virtually created. It is a common remark among American undergraduates, “I wish I knew what I was fitted for.” The college is under deep obligation to serve the nation not merely by presenting a great number of excellent subjects, which, if properly selected, will land the young man in positions of leadership and usefulness; but it may and must go beyond this negative education, and assist the student actually to form his life purpose.
American institutions of learning are at present neglecting an opportunity par excellence for presenting different phases of life-work to undergraduates, especially emphasizing the relation of this life-work to the great branches of leadership and modern enterprise. There are hundreds of students being graduated from our institutions to-day who have not decided what they are to do in after life. Even if we assume that these men are prepared in an all-round way for life, it must be realized that they are severely handicapped by the necessity of trying different lines of work for years after graduation before fixing upon their permanent vocation. They not only miss the tremendous advantage of enthusiasm and impulse of the young, but they are also in danger of drifting rather than of moving forward with positive and aggressive activity.