Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/579

Rh much more justifiable are the regret and resentment of the graduate who looks back upon college years that he was allowed utterly and obviously to waste.

In this connection, it may be legitimate at least to raise the question whether a courageous insistence upon real attainment in scholarship would result in the exclusion from college of a substantially larger number of men than the present weaker method does, or whether the result might not be simply to spur to greater effort large groups of gifted fellows who are now floating along the line of least resistance. Would such a policy exclude any men really worth keeping? The belief that college is a place primarily for study implies no contempt for the unscholarly type of man, who is frequently more attractive and occasionally a bit more able (along some lines) than the good student is. But that concession does not alter the obvious fact that only the man who can and will study has any right to be in an educational institution; an ignoramus or an idler is no more in place there than a poet in the supreme court or a college professor in the steel trust.

Finally, this great question of the college ideal is not solely an individual matter; it is altogether pertinent to look at it from the national point of view. So we may solemnly ask the exponent of the country-club ideal whether or not he believes that the American nation should expect her institutions of higher learning to demand hearty devotion to work from absolutely all of those who are preparing for life within their walls and who are supposed to be the material from which her leaders will come in the future. Perhaps we may even go so far as to suggest that a toning up of the intellectual life is one of the great needs of America to-day, and to ask whence this intellectual salvation is to come if not from our centers of education.

It is reasonable to believe that most college teachers do not subscribe to the anti-intellectual creed held by so many parents, alumni and undergraduates; nor do they all, by any means, approve of the policy of compromise of which some of their colleagues are guilty—though it may be that not all of those who believe in the severer standard are sufficiently honest and strong to fight for it. Moreover, it is not unduly optimistic to hold that there has been, speaking broadly, a general toning up of our educational standards in the last ten or twenty years. A great deal of the credit for this improvement may be due to some of our younger and less distinguished institutions, in which a desire for real mental training and for a large acquisition of knowledge is taken for granted, and where creditable intellectual attainments are demanded of every student, either by the spirit of the institution or by the courage of the administration. One can not but wonder whether these modest colleges will not train the Lincolns of the future—in spite of their lack of Oxfordian prestige. But the importance of the