I am not so presumptuous as to attempt to prophesy the precise forms which methods of moral guidance will take. Moral guidance is a delicate affair. Its spirit is more important than its procedure. Flexibility is its strength. Methods final, rigid, and minute do not belong to it. Nor can it afford to forget the one great truth of laissez-faire, that wills which are to be kept fresh and vigorous will not bear much looking after. Time, too, is an important factor in the shaping of moral influences. Experiments now in progress at Harvard and elsewhere must discriminate safe from unsafe limitations. Leaving then to the future the task of showing how wide the scope of maturing discipline may become, I will merely try to sketch the main lines along which experiments are now proceeding, I will give a few 245 illustrative examples of what is being done and why, and I will state somewhat at large how, in my judgment, more is yet to be accomplished. To make the matter clear, a free exposition shall be given of the puzzling headings already named; that is, I will first ramblingly discuss the limitations on choice which may deepen the student’s intentionality of aim; secondly, those which increase his information in regard to means; and thirdly, those which may strengthen his persistence in a course once chosen.
I. That intentionality should be cultivated, I need not spend many words in explaining. Everybody acknowledges that without a certain degree of it choice is impossible. Many persons assert also that boys come to college with no clear intentions, not knowing what they want, waiting to be told; for such, it is said, an elective system is manifestly absurd. I admit the fact. It is true. The majority of the freshmen whom I have known in the last seventeen years have been, at entrance, deficient in serious aims. But from this fact I draw a conclusion quite opposite to the one suggested. It is election, systematized election, which these boys need; for when we say a young student has no definite aims, we imply that he has never become sufficiently interested in any given intellectual line to have acquired the wish to follow that line farther. Such a state of things is lamentable, and certainly shows that prescribed 246 methods—the proper methods, in my judgment, for the school years—have in his case proved inadequate. It is useless to continue them into years confessedly less suited to their exercise. Perhaps it is about equally useless to abandon the ill-formed boy to unguided choice. Prescription says, “This person is unfit to choose, keep him so”; laissez-faire says, “If he is unfit to choose, let him perish”; but a watchful elective system must say, “Granting him to be unfit, if he is not spoiled, I will fit him.” And can we fit him? I know well enough that indifferent teachers incline to shirk the task. They like to divide pupils into the deceptive classes of good and bad, meaning by the former those who intend to work, and by the latter those who intend not to. But we must get rid of indifferent teachers. Teachers with enthusiasm in them soon discover that the two classes of pupils I have named may as well be dismissed from consideration. Where aims have become definite, a teacher has little more to do. The boy who means to work will get learning under the poorest teacher and the worst system; while the boy who means not to work may be forced up to the Pierian spring, but will hardly be made to drink. A vigorous teacher does not assume intention to be ready-made. He counts it his continual office to help in making it. On the middle two quarters of a class he spends his hardest efforts, on 247 students who are friendly to learning but not impassioned for it, on those who like the results of study but like tennis also, and popularity, and cigars, and slackness. The culture of these weak wills is the problem of every college. Here are unintentional boys waiting to be turned into intentional men. What limitations on intellectual and moral vagrancy will help them forward?
The chief limitation, the one underlying all others, the one which no clever contrivance can ever supersede, is vitalized teaching. Suitable subjects, attractively taught, awake lethargic intention as nothing else can. An elective system, as even its enemies confess, enormously stimulates the zeal of teachers. It consequently brings to bear on unawakened boys influences of a strangely quickening character. When I hear a man trained under the old methods of prescription say, “At the time I was in college I could not have chosen studies for myself, and I do not believe my son can,” I see, and am not surprised to see, that he does not understand what forces the elective system sets astir. So powerful an influence have these forces over both teachers and pupils, that questions of hard and easy studies do not, as outsiders are apt to suppose, seriously disturb the formation of sound intentions. The many leaders in education whose opinions on election I quoted in my previous paper agree that the new modes tend to 248 sobriety and intentionality of aim. When Professor Ladd speaks of “the unexpected wisdom and manliness of the choices already made” in the first year of election at New Haven, he well expresses the gratified surprise which every one experiences on perceiving in the very constitution of the elective system a sort of limitation on wayward choice. This limitation seems to me, as Professor Ladd says he found it,[8] a tolerable preventive of choices directly aimed at ease. In a community devoted to athletics, baseball is not played because it is “soft,” and football avoided on account of its difficulty. A similar state of things must be brought about in studies. In a certain low degree it has come about already. As election breeds new life in teaching, the old slovenly habit of liking best what costs least begins to disappear. Easy courses will exist and ought to exist. Prescribed colleges, it is often forgotten, have more of them than elective colleges. The important matter is, to see that they fall to the right persons. Where everything is prescribed, students who do not wish easy studies are still obliged to take them. Under election, soft courses may often be pursued with advantage. A student whose other courses largely depend for their 249 profit on the amount of private reading or of laboratory practice accomplished in connection with them is wise in choosing one or more in which the bulk of the work is taken by the teacher. I do not say that soft courses are always selected with these wise aims in view. Many I know are not. We have our proper share of hardened loafers—“tares in our sustaining corn”—who have an unerring instinct as to where they can most safely settle. But large numbers of the men in soft courses are there to good purpose; and I maintain that the superficial study of a subject, acquainting one with broad outlines, is not necessarily a worthless study. At Harvard to-day I believe we have too few such superficial courses. As I look over the Elective Pamphlet, and note the necessarily varying degrees of difficulty in the studies announced there, I count but six which can, with any justice, be entitled soft courses; and several of these must be reckoned by anybody an inspiration to the students who pursue them. There is a tendency in the elective system, as I have shown elsewhere, to reduce the number of soft courses somewhat below the desirable number.
I insist, therefore, that under a pretty loose elective system boys are little disposed to intentionally vicious choices. My fears look in a different direction. I do not expect depravity, but I want to head off aimless trifling. I agree with the opponents of 250 election in thinking that there is danger, especially during the early years of college life, that righteous intention may not be distinct and energetic. Boys drift. Inadequate influences induce their decisions. The inclinations of the clique in which a young man finds himself are, without much thought, accepted as his own. Heedlessness is the young man’s bane. It should not be mistaken for vice; the two are different. A boy who will enter a dormitory at twelve o’clock at night, and go to the third story whistling and beating time on the banisters, certainly seems a brutish person; but he is ordinarily a kind enough fellow, capable of a good deal of self-sacrifice when brought face to face with need. He simply does not think. So it is in study: there, too, he does not think. Now in college a boy should learn perpetually to think; and an excellent way of helping him to learn is to ask him often what he is thinking about. The object of the questioning should not be to thwart the boy’s aims, rather to insure that they are in reality his own. Essentially his to the last they should remain, even though intrinsically they may not be the best. Young persons, much more than their elders, require to talk over plans from time to time with an experienced critic, in order to learn by degrees the difficult art of planning. By such talk intentionality is fortified. There is much of this talk already; talk of younger students with older, talk 251 with wise persons at home, and more and more every year with the teachers of the courses left and the courses entered. All this is good. Haphazard modes breed an astonishing average of choices that possess a meaning. The waste of a laissez-faire system comes nowhere near the waste of a prescribed. But what is good when compared with a bad thing may be poor when compared with excellence itself. We must go on. A college, like a man, should always be saying, “Never was I so good as to-day, and never again will I be so bad.” We must welcome criticisms more than praises, and seek after our weak points as after hid treasures. The elective system seems to me weak at present through lacking organized means of bringing the student and his intentions face to face. Intentions grow by being looked at. At the English universities a young man on entering a college is put in charge of a special tutor, without whose consent he can do little either in the way of study or of personal management.[9] Dependence so extreme is perhaps better suited to an infant school than to an American college; and even in England, where respectful subservience on the part of the young has been cultivated for generations, the system is losing ground. Since the tutors were allowed to marry and to leave the 252 college home, tutorial influence has been changing. In most American colleges twenty-five years ago there were officers known as class tutors, to whom, in case of need, a student might turn. Petty permissions were received from these men, instead of from a mechanical central office. So far as this plan set personal supervision in the place of routine it was, in my eyes, good. But the relation of a class tutor to his boys was usually one of more awe than friendship. At the Johns Hopkins University there is a board of advisers, to some member of which each student is assigned at entrance. The adviser stands in loco parentis to his charges. The value of such adjustments depends on the nature of the parental tie. If the relation is worked so as to stimulate the student’s independence, it is good; if so as to discharge him from responsibility, it unfits for the life that follows. At Harvard special students not candidates for a degree have recently been put in charge of a committee, to whom they are obliged to report their previous history and their plans of study for each succeeding year. The committee must know at all times what their charges are doing. Something of this sort, I am convinced, will be demanded at no distant day, as a means of steadying all students in elective colleges. Large personal supervision need not mean diminution of freedom. A young man may possess his freedom more solidly if he recognizes 253 an obligation to state and defend the reasons which induce his choice. For myself, I should be willing to make the functions of such advisory committees somewhat broad. As a college grows, the old ways of bringing about acquaintance between officers and students become impracticable. But the need of personal acquaintance, unhappily, does not cease. New ways should be provided. A boy dropped into the middle of a large college must not be lost to sight; he must be looked after. To allow the teacher’s work of instruction to become divorced from his pastoral, his priestly, function is to cheapen and externalize education. I would have every student in college supplied with somebody who might serve as a discretionary friend; and I should not think it a disadvantage that such an expectation of friendship would be as apt to better the instructor as the student.
Before leaving this part of my subject, I may mention a subordinate, but still valuable, means of limiting choice so as to increase its intentionality. The studies open to choice in the early years should be few and elementary. The significance of advanced courses cannot be understood till elementary ones are mastered, and immature choice should not be confused by many issues. At Harvard this mode of limitation is largely employed. Although the elective list for 1886-87 shows 172 courses, a freshman has hardly more than one eighth of these to 254 choose from; in any given case this number will probably be reduced about one half by insufficient preparation or conflict of hours. Seemingly about a third of the list is offered to the average sophomore; but this amount is again cut down nearly one half by the operation of similar causes. The practice of hedging electives with qualifications is a growing one. It may well grow more. It offers guidance precisely at the point where it is most needed. It protects rational choice, and guards against many of the dangers which the foes of election justly dread.
II. A second class of limitations of the elective system, possible and friendly, springs from the need of furnishing the young elector ample information about that which he is to choose. The best intentions require judicious aim. If studies are taken in the dark, without right anticipation of their subject-matter, or in ignorance of their relation to other studies, small results follow. Here, I think it will be generally agreed, prescribed systems are especially weak. Their pupils have little knowledge beforehand of what a course is designed to accomplish. Work is undertaken blindly, minds consenting as little as wills. An elective system is impossible under such conditions. Its student must know when he chooses, what he chooses. He must be able to estimate whether the choice of Greek 5 will further his designs better than the choice of Greek 8.
At Harvard, methods of furnishing information are pretty fully developed. In May an elective pamphlet is issued, which announces everything that is to be taught in the college during the following year. Most departments, also, issue additional pamphlets, describing with much detail the nature of their special courses, and the considerations which should lead a student to one rather than another. If the courses of a department are arranged properly, pursuing one gives the most needful knowledge about the available next. This knowledge is generally supplemented at the close of the year by explanations on the part of the instructor about the courses that follow. In the Elective Pamphlet a star, prefixed to courses of an advanced and especially technical character, indicates that the instructor must be privately consulted before these courses can be chosen. Consultations with instructors about all courses are frequent. That most effective means of distributing information, the talk of students, goes on unceasingly. With time, perhaps, means may be devised for informing a student more largely what he is choosing. The fullest information is desirable. That which is at present most needed is, I think, some rough indication of the relations of the several provinces of study to one another. Information of this sort is peculiarly hard to supply, because the knowledge on which it professes to rest cannot be precise and unimpeachable. We 256 deal here with intricate problems, in regard to which experts are far from agreed, problems where the different point of view provided in the nature of each individual will rightly readjust whatever general conclusions are drawn. The old type of college had an easy way of settling these troublesome matters dogmatically, by voting, in open faculty-meeting, what should be counted the normal sequence of studies, and what their mixture. But as the votes of different colleges showed no uniformity, people have gradually come to perceive that the subject is one where only large outlines can distinctly be made out.[10] 257 To these large outlines I think it important to direct the attention of undergraduates. In most German universities a course of Encyclopädie is offered, a course which gives in brief a survey of the sciences, and attempts to fix approximately the place of each in the total organization of knowledge. I am not aware that such a course exists in any American college. Indeed, there was hardly a place for it till dogmatic prescription was shaken. But if something of the kind were now established in the freshman year, our young men might be relieved of a certain intellectual short-sightedness, and the choices of one year might better keep in view those of the other three.
III. And now granting that a student has started with good intentions and is well informed about the direction where profit lies, still have we any assurance that he will push those intentions with a fair degree of tenacity through the distractions which beset his daily path? We need, indeed we must have, a third class of helpful limitations which may secure the persistent adhesion of our student to his chosen line of work. Probably this class of limitations is 258 the most important and complex of all. To yield a paying return, study must be stuck to. A decision has little meaning unless the volition of to-day brings in its train a volition to-morrow. Self-direction implies such patient continuance in well-doing that only after persistence has become somewhat habitual can choice be called mature. To establish onward-leading habits, therefore, should be one of the chief objects in devising limitations of election. Only we must not mistake; we must look below the surface. Mechanical diligence often covers mental sloth. It is not habits of passive docility that are desirable, habits of timidity and uncriticising acceptance. Against forming these pernicious and easily acquired habits, it may be necessary even to erect barriers. The habit wanted is the habit of spontaneous attack. Prescription deadened this vital habit; it mechanized. His task removed, the student had little independent momentum. Election invigorates the springs of action. Formerly I did not see this, and I favored prescribed systems, thinking them systems of duty. That absence of an aggressive intellectual life which prescribed studies induce, I, like many others, mistook for faithfulness. Experience has instructed me. I no longer have any question that for the average man sound habits of steady endeavor grow best in fields of choice. Emerson’s words are words of soberness:—