Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/81

Rh of colleges the adoption of the old curriculum would seem unwise, for the preparation needed for professional study to-day is quite other than it was in the seventeenth century.

One change entailed in the college curriculum by the growing complexity of modern social conditions is some recognition in the courses of instruction of those conditions themselves. In a democratic country we should all know how the other half lives. Social problems and needs must be learned. I wish to emphasize the truth that if they are to be known they must be taught. People who appear callous and cruel, indifferent to private needs and public welfare, are often merely uninformed. That the undergraduate years offer the opportunity for the presentation of such matter there is sufficient evidence.

During the last few years my department has taken up with the students in pedagogy the educational aspects of the university settlement, child-labor legislation, juvenile crime, the home, defectives, primitive peoples, eugenics, morals and hygiene, the immigrant, the new schools, open-air schools, etc. The work is conducted in seminar style, each student choosing a topic for intensive treatment. The response to these subjects from juniors, seniors and graduates is very cordial and very immediate. They cover, if you like, the romantic and sentimental phases of social activity, and the appeal is no less powerful on that account. On the other hand, there is no attempt on my part to suppress a discussion of the futility of some forms of philanthropy. I think the ultimate effect of such a course is to give content to the idea of good citizenship, to check latent snobbishness, and to increase a sense of the sanity and worth of the ordinary daily activities, especially the activities of the teaching profession.

There are other approaches to this same end, of which our professors are availing themselves. Courses in ethics are being given in many of the American colleges with excellent effects, and in these courses particular pains are taken to study the relation of the college to the complex social conditions in which we live. The teacher of ethics has the advantage that he can treat with authority the question of moral standards, such as the relative claims of benevolence and justice, trained, hard-headed thinking on which is one of the present needs of the democracy. But from what particular department the advocacy of the social claim comes, is a matter of indifference so long as it comes with conviction and force. History, sociology, economics, ethics, pedagogy, English, other modern languages, Latin and Greek in a marked degree, as I have implied, offer the mature mind an opportunity of broadening the social sympathy and deepening the moral consciousness of the students. It is impossible, without going into the details of class work, to indicate fully the intimate, subjective value to character of the quiet presentation of social facts. We are enlisting the interest, the thought,