The characteristics of a college course demanded by our American undergraduates is determined by two things; first, by the character of the man who is to be educated, and second, by the kind of world in which the man is to live and work. Without these two factors vividly and practically in mind, all plans for courses of study, recreation, teaching, or methods of social and religious betterment are theoretical and uncertain.
After ten years of travel among American college men, studying educational tendencies in not less than seven hundred diverse institutions in various parts of the United States and Canada, it is my deep conviction that the chief need of our North American Educational system is to focus attention upon the individual student rather than upon his environment, either in the curriculum or in the college buildings.
A few great teachers in every worthy North American institution who know and love the boys, have always been and doubtless will continue to be the secret of the power of our schools and colleges. There are indications that our present educational system involving vast endowments will be increasingly directed to the end of engaging as teachers the greatest men of the time, men of great heart as well as of great brain who will live with students, truly caring for them as well as teaching them. We shall thus come nearer to solving the problem of preparing young men for leadership and useful citizenship.
That this is the sensible and general demand of graduates is easily discovered by asking any college alumnus to state the strongest and most abiding impression left by his college training. Of one hundred graduates whom I asked the concrete question, “What do you consider to be the most valuable thing in your college course?”—eighty-six said, substantially: “Personal contact with a great teacher.”
Clayton Sedgwick Cooper.
March 12th, 1912.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,—to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.