Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/188

 184 been thoroughly imbued with the idea that the chief object of his teachers is to impose tasks and limit his personal liberty. He feels a certain degree of exultation in 'getting ahead' of those whose duty it is to be vigilant, and he carries this spirit to the college. The temptation to cheat continues as long as fetters exist, whether actually or in his imagination.

3. The difficulty is least where there is the greatest freedom in the election of courses of study, and greatest where a fixed curriculum is maintained with a high standard for graduation. The existence of a curriculum implies rigidity. The student must endure much arduous labor because it is prescribed. He may be informed that it will do him much good in due time, but he is skeptical, and cheating is the most natural resource.

4. The difficulty is observed to be greater in technical and professional schools than in those where much of the work is avowedly for the sake of culture. In the technical school the cost to the student is high. He wishes to begin applying his acquisitions to the work of self-support as soon as possible. To fail in an examination may mean the spending of many hundreds of dollars extra, and the loss of a year of valuable time from remunerative employment. He regards the entire subject from a commercial standpoint and treats it as such.

The most conspicuous tendency in America of late years has been toward the substitution of urban activity for rural quiet. Urban standards are increasingly established in all the more prosperous institutions of learning outside of the cities. The gradual extinction of the honor system in colleges, as we understand this term to-day, seems, therefore, inevitable. Such a conclusion, though unwelcome, is not wholly pessimistic. The honor system where it now exists should be carefully guarded and everything possible should be done to encourage self-government in colleges, to develop the feeling of responsibility among the students for the integrity of the degrees conferred by the institution with which they are identified. The reputation of the college suffers irreparable injury if the public has reason to believe that its degrees are won by fraud. But in general society the honor system has its substitute in the unwritten code maintained by people of refinement and social culture. When interests clash or crime is committed recourse is had to the law of the land, and well known rules of legal procedure are applied. By the general public a man of honor is recognized as such after his habits of speech and action have been manifested and his character has become thus established. Whatever may be the differences of standard professed, college ethics will be conformed to the ethics of general society. Every student should be at least provisionally assumed to be a man of honor; and he should be treated as such so long as his conduct warrants the assumption. In the great majority of cases his word can be accepted, just as this is