Page:Essays on the Higher Education.djvu/112

 term, however, 53 choices of courses in higher mathematics (calculus, vector analysis, etc.) have been made by juniors and seniors, and 179 choices in the ancient classics, 99 in Latin, and 80 in Greek, by the same classes. (1 give the number of choices rather than of men, as indicating better the amount of interest taken in a given subject.) It should be remembered, also, that each of these choices involves responsibility for the performance of a daily task, as distinguished from cramming for an examination. I am unable to say that the Harvard system has no statistics to match these. But I have a pretty firm conviction that students who have been kept regularly at hard work in prescribed courses for the first two years of a college course will be far more likely to enjoy hard work in the later years of that course.

The last remark would, of course, hold true only in case the standard of scholarship were kept well up, and the instruction made bracing and attractive. I am therefore led to examine briefly two other excellences which Professor Palmer ascribes to the New Education. It is, he thinks, steadily raising the rank which is reckoned "decent scholarship." This is apparently proved by a comparative statement of the "marks" received by the average Harvard student in the different classes for the different years since 1874–75. I will say frankly, but without intending to cast the least