Chautauqua exalts the college. She believes that the benefits of a college training are manifold.
1. The action by which a youth becomes a college student—the simple going forth—leaving one set of circumstances and voluntarily entering another, with a specific purpose—is an action which has educating influence in it. It is a distinct recognition of an object and a deliberate effort to secure it. The judgment is convinced, the will makes a decision, and corresponding action follows. We have the thought, the aim, the standards, the resolve, the surrender, and the embodiment of all in an actual physical movement. There must follow these activities a reflex influence on the youth himself. It becomes a “new birth” in his life. He has gone to another plane. His everyday conduct is modified by it. He looks up and on. According to the standard he has set, the idea he entertains of education, and the motives which impel him will be the subjective effects of his action—the real power of his new life.
2. There is educating power in the complete plan of study provided in the college curriculum, covering as it does the wide world of thought, distributed over the years, with subdivisions into terms, with specific assignments of subjects, with a beginning and an ending of each division, and many beginnings and endings, with promotions according to merit, and final reviews, recognitions, and honors. There is great value in the enforced system of the college. It tends to sustain and confirm new life, begun when the student made his first movement toward an institution.
3. The association of students in college life is another educating factor. Mind meets mind in a fellowship of aim, purpose, and experience. They have left the same world; they now together enter another world. They look up to the heights and to the shining of crowns which await the gifted and faithful. They are brothers now—one “alma mater” to nourish them. They sing their songs—songs which, although without much sense, have power to awake and foster sympathy. Even a man of sense loves to listen to them. He laughs at the folly, and, though himself a sage, wishes he were one of the company of singers. The laws of affinity work out. Soul inspires soul. Memories grow apace. Attachments that endure, adventures seasoned with fun or touched with sadness, absurdities, failures, heroisms, triumphs, are crowded into the four years, and like fruitage of bloom and fragrance from a conservatory may go forth to bless many an hour of wandering, of sorrow, of reunion, of remembrance, in the later years. There was something pathetic in the return of the famous Yale College class of 1853 to their alma mater two summers ago. As they wandered about the scenes of their youth, under the old elms, through recitation rooms and chapel, singing the old songs, reviving the old friendships, recalling faces to be seen no more, no wonder that tears fell down furrowed cheeks from eyes unused to weep. Is there any stronger or sweeter friendship than that born under the ivied towers and spreading elms of college hall and campus?
In college mind meets mind in the severe competition of recitation and annual examination. The bright boy—one of a small class at home, who had it all his own way there—now finds a score or more of leaders whose unvoiced challenge he is compelled to accept, and how he does knit his brow, close his eyes, summon his strength, school his will, force his flagging energies, and grapple problems that he may hold his own, outstrip his rivals, and win prize and place for the sake of his family’s fame and for his personal satisfaction!
There is nothing that so discovers to a youth the weak points of his character as the association of college life. There are no wasted courtesies among students. Folly is soon detected, and by blunt speech, bold caricature, and merciless satire exposed. Sensitiveness is cured by ridicule, cowardice never condoned, and meanness branded beyond the possibility of concealment or pardon. College associations stimulate the best elements in a man, expose weak and wicked ones, and tend to the pruning and strengthening of character.
4. Then there is in college life association with professors and tutors, and this is, I confess, sometimes of little value, as when teachers are mere machines, but in it, at its best, are distinguishing benefits. When teachers are full men, apt men, and enthusiastic men—as college professors, and for that matter all teachers ought to be—the place of recitation soon becomes a center of power. Tact tests attainment, exposes ignorance, foils deceit, develops strength, indicates lines of discovery, and inspires courage. A living teacher supplies at once model and motive. He has gone on among the labyrinths, and up the steeps of knowledge; has tried and toiled and triumphed. He sought and he is. And now by wise questioning, by judicious revelation, by skillful concealment, by ingenious supposition, by generous raillery, by banter, by jest, by argument and by magnetic energies, the teacher stirs the student into supreme conditions of receptivity and activity. Such teachers make the college. As President Garfield said: “Give me an old school house, and a log for a bench. Put Mark Hopkins on one end, and let me, as student, sit on the other, and I have all the college I need.” When an institution is able to employ men of superior knowledge, power, and tact, students must be trained, and all their after lives affected by the influence. For memory magnifies the worth of a true teacher, and the hero of the college quadrennium becomes a demigod through the post-graduate years. A dozen men of this mold, if once they could be gotten together, would make a college the like of which has not yet been seen on the planet. Shall Chautauqua one of these days find them?
5. The college life promotes mental discipline. It drills, and drills, and draws out. It compels effort, and effort strengthens. It provides a system of mental gymnastics. What was difficult at first, soon becomes easy, until severer tests are sought from the very delight the student finds in concentration and persistency. Thus development takes place in the varied faculties of the soul. The student acquires power to observe with scientific exactness, to generalize wisely from accumulated data, to project hypotheses, to watch psychical processes, to reason with accuracy, to distinguish between the false and the true, both in the inner and the outer world; to grasp protracted and complicated processes of mathematical thought; to trace linguistic evolutions—remembering, analyzing, philosophizing; to study the students of the ages, and the products of their genius in art, poetry, jurisprudence, and discovery, in the facts of history and the great principles of sociology. All the powers employed in this manifold work during the college term are trained and thus prepared for work after the college term is ended. It is not so much the amount of knowledge acquired during the four years, as it is the power at will ever after to acquire knowledge, that marks the benefits of the college course.
6. With discipline comes the comprehensive survey of the universe. The college outlook takes the student backward along the line of historical development. It shows him the heights and the depths, the manifold varieties and inter-relations of knowledge. It gives him tools and the training to use them, and a glance at the material on which he is to use them. The student through college is a traveler, sometimes examining in detail, sometimes superficially. He gives a glance and remembers; he takes notes and thinks closely. He sees the all-surrounding regions of knowledge, and although he may make but slight researches in particular lines, he knows where to return in the after years for deeper research and ampler knowledge.
7. College life leads to self-discovery. It tests a man’s powers, and reveals to him his weakness. It shows him what he is best fitted to do, and the showing may not be in harmony either with his ambitions or his preconceived notions. A boy born for mercantile pursuits, who comes out of college a lawyer or preacher, proves that the college failed to do its legitimate and most important work for him. Professors who merely glorify intellectual attainment, and who neglect to show students their true place in the world, are little better than cranks or hobbyists. College life is the whole of life packed into a brief period, with the elements that make life magnified and intensified, so that tests of character may easily be made. It is a laboratory of experiment, where natural laws and conditions are pressed into rapid though normal operation, and processes otherwise extending over long periods of time are crowded to speedy consummation. Twenty years of ordinary life, so far as they constitute a testing period of character are, by college life, crowded into four years. A boy who is a failure then, would, for the same reasons, be a failure through the longer probation, unless the early discovery of peculiar weakness may be a protection against the perils which this weakness involves. Therefore it is a good thing for a youth to subject himself thus early to a testing, for from it may come self-discovery, when latent powers may be developed, and impending evils avoided.