What is the college accomplishing toward the solution of that vital subject, the question of the immigrant? The possibilities of dealing with such far-reaching international problems is indicated by the influence of a college debate upon the subject, “What shall we do with the immigrant?” Through his reading and investigation of the subject, a certain student who engaged in this debate received his first impetus toward what has proved to be one of the main contributions of his life to the nation by the establishment of Italian colonies that are probably as effective as any plans which are being suggested or utilized for the betterment of our foreign population.
MENTAL RESOURCEFULNESS
According to President John G. Hibben of Princeton, graduates on the average earn only six dollars per week at the start. He justifies this low earning power by saying, “It is our endeavor to create a high potential of mental possibility rather than actual attainment.”
We are inclined to consider efficiency only as expressed along social, economic, industrial, or mechanical lines. It is not strange in a period when financial standing bulks large in the minds of a comparatively new people that the recognition of the learned classes should be less noticeable than formerly. Yet reactive tendencies from strictly utilitarian education are evident. Individual and ideal aims of education are beginning to emerge above the commercial and mechanical aims. Already the salaries of college presidents and college teachers are increased, offering additional incentive for men of brains and scholarly achievement. Masters of industry who have been slaving for industrial and social progress are now becoming eager to push their accomplishments onward to mental and spiritual satisfactions. How otherwise can we explain such establishments as the Carnegie Foundation, the millions of Mr. Morgan for art, the vast sums contributed to religion and education in this and other lands? The ethical and social ideals of to-day are attaching thousands of our best youth to far-reaching endeavor. There is a new quest for that philosophy of life which, as Novalis stated it, could indeed bake no bread, but would give us God, freedom, and immortality. These are the signs of a new age of mental productivity—an age in which scholarship and learning will have a value for themselves; when people will appreciate that it is not merely the book one studies, but how he studies it that counts; that if we can produce a man of scholarly, thoughtful ability, we are sending into the world a person who will be proficient along any line in which he may engage.
In a Harvard address a few years ago, it was remarked by Mr. Owen Wister that America possessed only three men of unquestioned preëminence to whom students could turn for academic tuition in their respective lines. I believe it was Edmund Gosse who said that America had not produced a single poet deserving to rank with the unquestioned masters of English poetry. While these statements may be questioned, one realizes the general truth behind them when we contrast the marvelous and expensive architectural equipment of American universities with the paucity of great men and teachers.
The trend of the times, however, is slowly but certainly toward a new individualism. Attention is being focused more and more upon the values of life rather than upon the volume of life. The college graduate may not be able to deliver an oration in Hebrew in the morning and in Latin in the afternoon, but he is able to think through and around his problem, and this is mental resourcefulness, truly a chief aim of collegiate education and one of the first necessities for success. Emerson’s prophecy may be realized in our day:
Perhaps the time has already come, when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertion of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of frozen harvests. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce shall one day be the pole star for a thousand years.
The challenge is to our undergraduates. And it will be accepted. The colleges will teach men to think, to be mentally alert and resourceful, and then the man will count in the leadership of modern life, in the sense intended by Dr. Simeon who, upon seeing a trained graduate approach, exclaimed, “There comes three hundred men.”
In order to accomplish this, however, the college must make it a point to teach principles rather than dogmatic methods. Too often our systems of learning are too bookish. The boy is inclined to get the impression that there is only one way to do a thing, and that is the way he has learned from his professor or his text-book. A business man told me that he was recently obliged to dismiss one of his college graduates because the young man could not see or think of but one way to work out a mechanical proposition. His training had circumscribed him, cramped, limited, and enslaved him instead of freeing him. He was unable to move about easily in his sphere of chosen activity. He had gained a prejudice rather than a principle. He still lived in a classroom, though out in the world. His progress was water-logged in academic conservatism.