The Philistinization of College Students
A very interesting correspondent sends us the sort of letter we should rather have received than any other sort we can conceive of. It is quoted in full on another page of this issue. In it he asks if The Little Review will not succeed in creating a Drang und Sturm epoch; if it will not “stir the hearts of college men and women—those who have not yet been completely philistinized by their ‘vocational guides’; college men and women who in other countries have always been the torch-bearers, the advance-guard and martyrs in the fights for truth and ideals.” It was a definite impulse in this direction which gave birth to The Little Review; and while, after seven months, we cannot hope to have turned the world inside out the way it should be turned, we are sufficiently sanguine to believe that we have made a beginning. We are so close to the Drang und Sturm ourselves that perhaps we cannot see clearly. But we can hope, with that intensity which makes The Little Review our religion, that these things will come to pass. Incidentally, we believe in colleges on the same general basis that we believe in many other disciplines: it is impossible ever to learn too much on any subject. But we know there is something seriously wrong with the colleges; and a far graver danger than philistinization seems to us to lie in that hysterical confusion of values which causes our college students to see small things as big ones and to let the big ones slip by.