Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/610

606

sciences, like chemistry, biology and physiology, that are interwoven with medical studies; and they appear to attach greater weight to this than to his natural capacity or general attainments,

one wonders where those professors of medicine are who attach greater weight to rudimentary knowledge of certain sciences than to natural capacity, and whether any one holds that that natural capacity precludes scientific training or conversely.

The special training of a group or professional course is not its only advantage. An expert Sanskrit scholar is better fitted to become an entomologist than an amateur who has studied a little of everything. Any kind of an apperceptive mass—to use the slang of psychology—is better than none at all. The Columbia College faculty in requiring every freshman to take six or seven studies unrelated to one another and largely unrelated to his past or future work prescribes a method which not one member of the faculty would be so foolish as to adopt in his own work. The collective unwisdom of a college faculty is not often exceeded by an undergraduate student. Nor, it may be added, is the skill of a faculty in devising restrictive regulations equal to the ingenuity of the student in dodging them. As Mr. Eliot has recently said, while the word "must" may be heard hereafter more frequently at Cambridge, "I feel a very strong confidence in the ability of the youths that come to Harvard College to take that word with apparent submissiveness, but without allowing it to have any inconvenient effects on the individual."

It is doubtless true that students should not spend four years in electing elementary courses; it is well to persuade them and it may be desirable to compel them to do a certain amount of consistent work in some direction. The problem is largely social rather than educational; it is not serious in the colleges of the great state universities. They have all sorts of programs and curriculums; but as a rule the student does his work because it is of concern to him. He has a major subject; he has already begun, or will take up in a year or two, agriculture, medicine, engineering or some other life work, and in the meanwhile he is preparing for it. The air of the place is saturated with honest work. If these young men and women are crude, it is because their homes are but a generation from the frontier, not because their work in college is real. They not only learn more, but make more progress in polite manners and broadening interests than do the boys in the colleges of the Atlantic seaboard.

Before the section of education of the American Association for the Advancement of Science a year ago, addresses were made by Professor Boyce and Professor Tufts on "The American College and Life," which emphasized the need of giving reality to the work of college students by breaking clown the artificial barriers between culture