Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/175

Rh If now, the age of graduation which we have shown to be the prevailing one, viz., 22.5 years, be deemed still too old, three means of reducing this would seem to be possible: First, cut off one year from the college course, without lowering the entrance requirements; secondly, in view of the far greater efficiency of the secondary school, reduce the entrance requirements to college and, retaining the four! years' course, permit the boy to enter college, say, a year younger; thirdly, drop one year from the college course, increase the length of the actual weeks of residence and instruction to thirty-eight or forty, and endeavor to disabuse the mind of the average collegian of the belief that college is a place to dawdle and loaf four years for the sake of a degree that he does not earn, but which he generally gets Just the same. The college would then have a serious opportunity to prove its right to existence, and if it succeeded, the present dilettantism of college life would tend to disappear.

One further suggestion we may venture to make. Every boy that has the native capacity to do college work should be put into the high school in the fall after he is fourteen years old, regardless of whether he has done all the prescribed grammar school work or not. If he can not then get ready for college by eighteen, don't let him go to college. He is not cut out for the strenuous intellectual life.