Page:Essays on the Higher Education.djvu/59

 the college curriculum. In other words, they have instituted graduate courses open only to those who have the requisite amount of secondary education. The development of these graduate courses has encountered several almost insuperable obstacles. The most hard and obstinate of these obstacles are the following: the prevalent low esteem of the highest truly scientific culture; the excessive estimate of what is called "practical" in education—of bread-and-butter studies (Brodstudien); the poor condition of the secondary education, and so the impossibility of offering the best to even the graduates of most of our colleges; the impatience of our American youth and of their guardians, that is quite opposed to that quiet continuous growth which the noblest learning and mental discipline must undergo, etc.

It appears that those colleges which have found themselves in condition to enlarge greatly the university part of the college curriculum are, as a rule, the ones which have also done most to provide graduate instruction. But thus far even these institutions have been obliged to leave the two halves, as it were, of a possible university instruction, separated by the graduation from all study of most of their pupils at the close of the college senior year. These institutions must as rapidly and completely as possible unite the two thus far separate halves into a unity of the university