Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/279

Rh No one would care to depreciate the conservation of race life that is accomplished through the mere fact of the existence of a group of teachers, a body of college customs, and well-equipped laboratories and libraries. But they are not finished products. They are means to an end in a living, growing organism. The end is the best life of all and the fullest life of the future. There is a distortion when the rich inheritance of the past that the university represents is not directed wholly and purposefully toward the students who are to be the race of to-morrow. To this end the university may well exert itself to have them feel that they are organically a part of it. Each student when he goes out should be, not a recipient from the institution, but a real incarnation of its best life. He must be in it and of it. The form of organization should tempt him into closer and closer heart relation with his school. Let it not be, either, a seeming act of charity or missionary enthusiasm on the part of instructors, or the best is lost. The advantage is mutual. Each student has some original endowment from nature to bring to the institution. I have heard it sometimes expressed that part of the fascination of the life of a teacher is in the personal enrichment and the multicolored quality of truth that come from mingling with many types of student minds when each is allowed to be at his best. In order to bring out the riches of his nature, generally as yet undiscovered even to himself, the attitude of the university toward the student and his attitude are almost everything. It can not reach him from the outside in; it can inspire and educate him only from the inside out. Let our universities be decentralized from their organization about institutionalism, and recentralized in the personal lives of students.