Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/87

Rh activity and initiative on the part of the student and greater freshness of response and cooperation in general.

The best methods, however, and the best results from college work can only be obtained when all college students and professors are engaged on some real, useful work instead of busying themselves with mere exercises. The tragedy of college life as seen by the up-to-date educator is that we in many cases are attempting to train for life activity by a series of exercises that can be regarded only as remote approximations to actual activities. This fault shows not merely in the college of liberal arts, but, where one would least expect it, in professional, and in spite of the rapid introduction of practical work, even in many engineering schools. In four or five years the engineering school as a rule does not undertake to teach engineering, but only to give preliminary exercise work to form in the future the basis for acquiring the profession of engineer. The remoteness of academic training from the real goal to be attained is naturally more marked in the other departments. One phase of this weakness is found in the endless theme work produced by students in compulsory English composition. As has been wittily said, there is a great difference between having something to say and having to say something, and in the work of composition the student is, indeed, placed in a notoriously artificial attitude. This serves here, however, merely as an illustration of a general defect observed in college work, which in the opinion of the writer results from our failure to demand for our work a social aim and purpose. How to provide real work and real activities for a thousand students on the college campus is a matter calling for some exercise of ingenuity. I must content myself with a single illustration of the work that might engage the scholarly activities of our undergraduates. The need of good translations of French, German, Italian, Spanish and other scientific works, our college and university men will readily join with me in recognizing. With, let us say, five hundred students in French, six hundred in German and a proportionate number in the other foreign languages, something of social value could surely be done in this matter under the direction of capable instructors. The translation last semester by eleven students in one of my classes of a complete French book of over three hundred pages opens up a vista of possibilities of real cooperative work of public importance.

If we held consistently to a distinct social purpose, most of the valid criticisms one hears of the college would be met. One of the severest critics of higher schooling of all sorts complains especially of the lack of effort at moral improvement. He emphasizes the futility of the college in helping the young man of limited means in the fundamental social matter of earning his own living. Others join him in pointing out the tendency of some of the colleges to become mere