Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/213

Rh furnished' man. Throughout, it should be remembered that college is not intended only for those who look forward to professional life.

And this means also a change in the preparation of men for college chairs. Men go through college as specialists; they follow graduate courses as specialists; they become college instructors as specialists. Such training does not fit men for college teaching, however well it may fit them for university teaching. Having never had symmetrical mental training, they can not understand the true purpose of college work, and they are liable to make the college student narrower than themselves. There must be a return to the older type of professors, men whose studies were not confined to the immediate area of their chairs. We are accustomed to laugh at the notion that a college consisting of a boy at one end of a log and Mark Hopkins at the other was complete—and we are right; but the conception underlying that notion is true in no small degree. The graduate of such a college had learned to think and the information which he had received was correlated, was his own. The writer reveres the memory of such a teacher in his college, Benjamin N. Martin, who, teaching philosophy well, succeeded also in welding together for the student mathematics, history and science into a well-related body of knowledge. His pupils learned to think and, as far as in them lay, to think for themselves.

Not the classics but the method of training made the men in the older colleges; students learned to think and they were compelled toobey. They learned much of self-control in college—an easier school than that of the world, where college students of to-day must learn the same lesson—or fail.