Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/612

608 The traditions of scholarship attaching to the college are indeed somewhat threadbare. From the monastery, by way of Oxford and Cambridge, came the American college. So long as it was controlled by the clergy for the education of the clergy and the church was a real part of the life of the people, the college was vital, as are to-day the schools of medicine, engineering and law. When intending lawyers and teachers—concerned like the clergymen with words, books and traditions—became a large element among college students the scholastic curriculum was not inept. Six or eight years' study of the elements of the classical languages—scarcely ever reaching so far as reading them with ease or writing them with correctness—did not accomplish so very much in the way of broadening interests and enlarging sympathies, but it gave a good drill and a common stock of knowledge and quotations, which made for the social homogeneity of a class. Poetry and art have so completely based themselves on the classical and biblical traditions that they are in danger of waning together.

Science has in the course of the past century caused a revolution in human life. Its applications have made democracy and universal education possible by enabling one man to do what formerly required ten. Science has created new professions and has at the same time provided the economic conditions which permit large numbers to follow them and to undergo a long period of unproductive apprenticeship. The same economic conditions have permitted the wealthy and potentially idle classes to increase to a vast horde largely lacking the traditions of an aristocracy. The lower death rate due to science is followed by a lower birth rate. Women partly freed from manual work and childbearing can be idle, go to college or engage in sedentary occupations. Then science has directly reformed our educational system by the new material which it has supplied and by the new method which it has made supreme.

The English and American colleges have but partially and imperfectly adjusted themselves to this new life. The ghost of the obsolescent scholastic system still hovers about the place; it is still haunted by the phantom of the gentleman who hunts over his country estate and drinks two bottles of wine for dinner, but whose son may become a curate or the proconsul of an empire. Oxford and Cambridge have, as a matter of fact, more nearly fitted themselves to the conditions of British society than have our seaboard colleges to American democracy. The B.A. may mean little more than a public-school education and three six-months of residence at the university, but the young men have on the whole a high sense of honor and duty, of traditions to be maintained. In addition to the poll men, there are honor courses at the universities which are strictly special and professional—preparatory to