Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/411

Rh us your needs." Finally, it is announced in bold type that full college credits will be given and that the fees will be moderate. One must not fail to note that the athletic teams of this college rank high; there are less than seventy male students, of whom 60 per cent, are freshmen and partials. Truly the scope of college work is expanding; dressmaking and folk dancing have attained the rank of university studies and, judging from past occurrences, there is every reason to suppose that they too will find their place along with other studies in literature and pure science among qualifications for the Ph.D. As that degree has now an actual commercial value to the possessor, the college should make its requirements not too severe.

But one can not contemplate this amazing increase in the number of candidates for degrees without apprehension. It was not without reason that a foreign visitor recently spoke of the American as "education-mad." A note of alarm was sounded in France several years ago, because there were 36,000 students in the universities and professional schools; it was thought ominous for the republic's welfare that so great a number of Frenchmen were looking forward to professional life, to abstinence from physical labor: how much greater is the danger here, where colleges claim an attendance nearly ten times as great; the greater proportion of the students are looking forward to teaching or some profession. Kinds of degrees are multiplied to suit the capacity or lack of capacity of the hoped-for students; hundreds of Ph.D.'s are put forth each year with narrow specialized training, most of whom expect to be employed in colleges where they may promulgate their a priori doctrines respecting conditions and remedies. Manual labor is despised; the youth of the land are flocking to the cities, which are already overburdened with the class not "fitted for anything in particular"; the trades are passing into control of aliens who exploit the country. They give opportunity to radicals for denunciation of a cold-hearted community which permits them to wallow in wretchedness and in a few years they return to their own land with a competence.

The wide-open door to higher education is not just to the community. Many writers appear to hold that the salvation of this country depends on education of all the people and college canvassers find in this a noble text. But secular education is no panacea for evils, public or private; on the contrary, it may aggravate them. Intellectual training in no wise affects the moral sense. Even in denominational colleges of the strictest type, direct moral instruction must be subordinate and somewhat generalized; and in any event the value of such instruction depends wholly on the standing of the man who gives it. The average professor in our larger colleges is hardly so important as the football or rowing coach, while in small colleges such instruction