II
EDUCATION À LA CARTE
“If I were to return to college, I should take nothing that was practical,” remarked a recent college graduate. This attitude reveals by contrast a somewhat wide-spread tendency of opinion toward practical and progressive studies.
At a public gathering not long since, the president of a great State institution in the Middle West said that he believed within another decade every course in the institution of which he was the head would be intended simply to fit men to earn a livelihood. A cultivated disciple of quiet and delightful studies who overheard this remark was heard to say almost in a groan, “If I thought that was true of American education generally, I should want to die.”
An even more significant note of warning against merely bread-and-butter studies comes from Amherst College, where the class of 1885 recently presented to the governing board the radical plan of abolishing entirely the degree of bachelor of science, with the purpose of building up a strictly classical course for a limited number of students admitted to college only by competitive examinations. The plan provides for the raising of a fund to meet any deficiency caused by the temporary loss of students and also for the increase of teachers’ salaries. The general idea in the mind of the Amherst committee is expressed as follows:
The proposition for which Amherst stands is that preparation for some particular part of life does not make better citizens than “preparation for the whole of it”; that because a man can “function in society” as a craftsman in some trade or technical work, he is not thereby made a better leader; that we have already too much of that statesmanship marked by ability “to further some dominant social interest,” and too little of that which is “aware of a world moralized by principle, steadied and cleared of many an evil thing by true and catholic reflection and just feeling, a world not of interest, but of ideas.” Amherst upholds the proposition that for statesmen, leaders of public thought, for literature, indeed for all work which demands culture and breadth of view, nothing can take the place of the classical education; that the duty of institutions of higher education is not wholly performed when the youth of the country are passed from the high schools to the universities to be “vocationalized,” but that there is a most important work to be performed by an institution which stands outside this straight line to pecuniary reward; that there is room for at least one great classical college, and we believe for many such.
Johnston Gate from the Yard, Harvard University
These opinions are impressive. No one can visit widely our American colleges without feeling the appropriateness of such warnings and demands. A story is told of the president of a college praying in chapel for the prosperity of his school and all new and “inferior” institutions. The prayer would seem to have been answered in the last decade, which marks the marvelous growth of modern technical institutions in America. This growth has been specially pronounced in the great State universities and in the institutions fitted to train men in practical education.