COLLEGE TRAINING DEFENDED

Mr. William W. Ellsworth, who has recently retired from the presidency of the Century Company, has said that the tendency of college education is to make the young man of literary inclinations a critic rather than a creative artist. "I do not think," writes Mr. Ellsworth in an article for the New York Times, "that any one conversant with the situation can say that we have as many writers of real significance today as we had twenty or thirty years ago. And it is this that makes me doubtful as to the value to literature of our enormous machinery of higher education-it is this that puzzles and rather depresses me when I think of the connection between college education and authorship."

The standard of education and culture in a country is apt to be judged by the character of literature produced by the country's authors during a certain period. Mr. Ellsworth bewails the decreasing number of good authors which this country has produced in the last two decades, and declares that the educational machinery of our colleges is at fault. It must be remembered that the population of the country has advanced with gigantic strides, and each decade has found American colleges struggling to expand their scolastic facilities in order to care for the mass of young men eager to learn. Simultaneous with the remarkable growth of the number of applicants for a college education, is the appearance of new aims and ideals in the minds of these young men. Never before have commercial enterprises, engineering projects, and financial adventures offered such rich prizes to the educated man. It is truly a mercenary age. The registration figures of the engineering schools in this country give conclusive proof of the change in the ideals of the men who enter our colleges. In 1870 there were 18 engineering schools in the country with 107 graduates, while six years ago, in 1910, there were 118 such schools and 4,700 graduates. Obviously these statistics tell the story.

The problem before the colleges today is quite different from that of sixty years ago. Business schools and graduate scientific schools have been founded to meet the demand of the changed wants of the students. In the same way the methods of teaching English and the different literatures have been adjusted to the altered intellectual tastes of the students.

Perhaps it will have to be admitted that the present system of teaching men to write and appreciate good English has not produced as great a number of noted authors as the system of fifty years ago. However, are not these courses in composition and comparative literature giving this mass of men whose minds are filled with commercial, non-literary ideas, an appreciation of the great literary literary productions? IT such courses succeed in doing only this, and fail to develop scores of authors, they still do a great and difficult work. Although authors are valued more highly than literary critics, if a college training can mould the average American undergraduate into merely a literary critic, it is unquestionably successful.

The truth of the question is that a man who is blessed with a genius for writing will become an author with or without college training. Mark Twain gained his college training in a printing office and a pilot house, and Cooper gained his on board a fighting ship. Schools of authorship will probably never exist, for the man who specializes in the art of authorship will need little help in the selection of his courses. College training will help these men of gifted ability, but it can never produce them. The reasons for the lack of literary geniuses during a certain period must be sought for elsewhere than in the system of college training.