Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/86

82 complain. The youngest freshman knows that success on the athletic field is not the chief end of man, and he is quick to note the falsetto in the football enthusiasm of the middle-aged and elderly professors when they pretend that the scores of the teams are the chief topic of academic interest.

Lack of appreciation of the educational value of college organization has blinded some educators to the merits of college fraternities. These organizations have a long and interesting history which can be traced back to the medieval nations at Bologna, Paris and the other early European universities. At present the college officer is likely to regard them rather as an administrative danger than as an educational opportunity. In our present system the fraternities are in effect if not in fact the vestigial remains of a university constitution in which the student body and the alumni played a vastly more important part than they do with us. A revival of academic freedom would restore the fraternities to their healthy functions. Now, as Birdseye and others too plainly show, a college fraternity, like other rudimentary organs, is liable under unfavorable conditions to deterioration and disease.

Again, if the students and the college in general with a fuller measure of academic freedom and an increased sense of their social responsibility would reconsider the curriculum and methods of instruction in the light of democratic principles, many wholesome changes could be brought about.

Besides instruction in sociology and the social aspects of pedagogy, economics, history, English and foreign literature already spoken of, I wish to mention here only one other subject, namely, physiology. Recent developments in natural science, above all, progress in bacteriology, have made the pursuit of this subject in college a pressing need. In addition to courses in scientific physiology we should have in every college popular courses on applied physiology for all the students, dealing with the vital questions of hygiene. Such courses are necessary for the guidance of the undergraduates in reference to diet, sleep, habits of study and of personal health in general. For, keeping our social purpose in view, it is not hard to see that one of the chief endeavors of the college should be to disseminate through the schools and in the homes the knowledge of hygienic science that is so necessary for the comfort and welfare of the people.

The social test of college culture would suggest many changes in the content and method of other college courses. The spirit of pedantry, to which all academic life is liable at times to fall victim, would be rectified by the challenge: "What is the social value and import of this?" If every college course were in its content socially important, then the students taking part would work more spontaneously, and the present methods of dictation and exact prescription would give way to greater