Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/83

Rh in the colleges of a democratic country and race? The changed conception of culture I have tried here to indicate as increasingly characteristic of the academic mind must impress college students with the reality, the robustness, of our ethical aims, and make of great educational value any instructor, no matter in what department, who holds and embodies it.

When young people leave college halls with dreams of the betterment of the human race, they should in the first place make sure that they do not prove a burden to their own families. An up-to-date, democratic culture should not interfere with their earning their own living. In fact, if properly educated, they will see in the choice of a calling a question of the greatest moral moment. To fit oneself for a vocation, to adapt oneself in a business way to society, is not hostile to true culture. It is in recognizing the real bearings of our daily task, and taking satisfaction in it that we grow into the only culture that seems worth while to the adult mind. Is it too much to say that one of the dangers of our age is the dilettante pursuit of scraps of the arts, and crumbs of the foreign languages? In the years of maturity the cultivation of these interests has something of the pathos of arrested development recurring to the styles and ideals of the teens.

The change in the attitude of professors and students towards the needs of the people and the welfare and progress of society, so intimately educational in its nature, seems to me the most promising factor in the movement for college and university reform. As a professor of pedagogy I would here lay the chief emphasis; but this change in the conception of academic culture implies further changes to which I must hasten.

Space does not permit me to speak of all that American colleges are doing, all that is still left them to do, in laying the cultural foundation, as I understand the term, for the learned and other professions. If our doctors were all true guardians of the public health, if all our engineers were bent on furthering hygienic conditions, if all lawyers were zealous in the cause of social justice, if all clergymen appreciated the larger aspects of the people's needs, the cause of human welfare would be secure. I must pause a moment, however, to say something concerning the relation of the college to the schools.

In the American college that I know most intimately about four hundred students are received annually from the secondary schools and other colleges. About one hundred and fifty are graduated every June. Of the graduates, seventy or seventy-five return as teachers to the schools. The secondary school affords the college, therefore, one of its most important points of social contact. It is largely through the high schools and academies, which in turn influence the grades, that the college makes its culture tell on the lives of the poor and common people,