Our high schools stop short of finishing the preparation of students for University work. Our universities assume part of the high school function along with their own. The German Gymnasium and French lycée include the equivalents of the American college Freshmen and part of the Sophomores. They finish up the drill and discipline stage of education. The Continental university begins and carries on the stage of intelligent and self-chosen and independent work. But in the American universities there must be discipline, college yells, drill in routine and elementary work, classes handled on the basis of averages, and teachers of the Gymnasium and lycée type, existing side by side with recognition and encouragement of the individual freedom of bent, disregard of credit hours and assigned tasks, and scholarly professors and investigators of real university type.
The outcome is that the drill teachers are made pseudo-investigators; the investigators made unwilling drill teachers. The students are invited to soar, and at the same time ordered to march in ranks. Preparatory school rules are made for the sake of the Freshmen, which the Seniors have to obey. Freedom of choice in study is offered because of the Seniors and graduates, to the utter demoralization of the Freshmen.
Because of this impossible juxtaposition of discipline and freedom, drill and inspiration, the American university feels sick. It knows very well that something is the matter with it. It has to be all things to all students, and is, in fact, too little of a real thing to any of them.
Wanted: Proportionate News
The most noteworthy difference between European and American Journalism, as regards news, is the prominence we give to what is technically called the news of the day. Let a great liner be sunk or saved and all the newspapers, even the most conservative, print page on page of repetitious story or comment, playing on the emotions from every point of view. No European paper would feature even the most affecting news on any such scale. Doubtless our American practice is a natural enough tribute from the editors to the mobility of our sympathies, not to say the flightiness of our minds. What the enthralled reader does not realize is that to provide him with the completely modulated thrill of the day scores of important items of routine news have been curtailed to meaningless epitome or wholly suppressed. For several days that duty of daily chronicle which a good newspaper ordinarily performs is intermitted. The most important debates of a congressional year will receive bare notice so long as a heroic Marconi operator is in the public eye. The greatest of foreign statesmen or authors might die in the glorious interim and receive the barest notice; a revolution in Persia would yield to a factory fire on the East Side.
Now something of this disproportion is necessary. No paper could live in America which scrupulously treated news according to its abstract importance regardless of the reader's cravings. Yet a journal that respects itself has a function of daily chronicle that should under no circumstances be suspended. A really good newspaper ought to be valuable material for the historian, and our best newspaper will several times in every twelvemonth leave him badly in the lurch. For a week he will find admirable reports of say the discussion of a very important measure like the currency bill, and then suddenly the Volturno und kein Ende. Just about the time when mail letters were beginning to tell a certain amount of truth about the Messina earthquake, the telegraphic reports of which were egregious inventions of distant improvisers, The Republic was saved through the intrepidity of Jack Binns. A correspondent who had been on the ground at Messina and remained in close touch with the rescuers and refugees received the sufficient answer with regard to additional earthquake facts "Jack Binns has killed Messina." Here is obviously both a good and a bad reason. There was every reason for celebrating at length the pluck and loyalty of Jack Binns, and no reason for curtailing the record of one of the greatest disasters registered in history.
The first duty of a good newspaper is to the more important routine news. It is a duty that every American journal neglects at times quite scandalously. The old fashion of relegating striking news of the day to an extra had much to commend it. Abuse of the extra by the yellow press has pretty well killed the practice among the conservative papers. Possibly a discreet revival of the legitimate extra might help matters. But what is really needed is a juster sense of proportion and a clearer conception of duty among editors. With a little insight and much courage a managing editor might make himself the controller of the "news of the day," rather than its mere conduit. In the long run his paper would more than gain in steady prestige what it lost in occasional flurries of sensational success.
Simplified Spelling
Rather than bother our readers and distract their attention from what we have to say, we print in the orthographic forms we are all accustomed to. But we realize that many of these forms are inconsistent and irrational—more so in English than in any other civilized language—and that the difficulty of learning them wastes the time and tissue of our children, and obstructs among foreigners the spread of English to its natural position of a world language, with the blessings that its attaining that position would bring in peace and commerce.