Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/769

 SHORTENING THE COLLEGE COURSE 749

younger than is the custom at present, so that the ship of state may be kept sailing on.

Those who assert that young men of today dally too long in schools before taking up the burdens of real life are determined in their views, not by any present public need of their services, not by any bad social condition, but simply by their feeling (which we all possess to a greater or less degree) that as soon as a boy comes of age he ought to shift for himself. And the age at which he is assumed to arrive at his majority has been passed down unchanged from remote times. Many of us do not consider that the period of immaturity may be continually lengthening, due alike to transformations in the social organism and to grad- ual modifications in human nature itself. It has never occurred to some persons that it is exceedingly arbitrary to say on just what day a boy attains that development of mind and body which should fit him to live a perfectly independent life. The neurologists are telling us today that the brain goes on develop- ing until the age of thirty-three at any rate, and it would be more rational from one point of view to make the latter rather than the earlier age the age of majority.

Few seem fully to appreciate a point to which John Fiske called attention some years ago, and which others have exploited at some length since, that the long period of unripeness in the indi- vidual of the human species has been one of the primary factors in the advancement of mankind. The chick comes of age very soon after birth. Before the expiration of its fourth or fifth month of terrestrial experience it has achieved the summit of its evolu- tion; it can earn its own living by this time, and look out for itself generally without assistance from its parents. The same is true in principle of the colt and calf and kitten and puppy. But the human child is compelled to mewl in its nurse's arms for many long months ; and for many long years he requires the constant care and protection of his elders. As Mr. Russell has said :

It is written that he is born like the wild ass's colt ; but this overstates the fact in his favor, for the wild ass's colt is greatly his superior at birth. And