The Trait of Leadership.

(We invite all men in the University to submit communications on subjects of timely interest, but assume no responsibility for sentiments expressed under this head.)

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

To my total surprise I found myself a contributor to Saturday's CRIMSON. After some four perusals of the communication labelled "Conditions Suggested," I was able to gather that the alter ego who had perpetrated this forgery had concealed within the article sentiments precisely opposite to my own.

Now, if never before, we must revaluate the aims of college education. There is absolutely no justification for men to stay in college during this crisis, unless they are acquiring traits of leadership which will make their future value far outweigh their present worth.

Should we, therefore, make education more materialistic? For two reasons we should not: (1) The greatest after the-war problems will be social and moral, not materialistic. However much we may be concerned about the expansion of our South American trade, we are far more concerned about conserving the moral insights of war and of salvaging the social wreckage that forms in its wake. (2) Modern life overemphasizes the materialistic. Strong enough in any age, the magnetic pull of the almighty dollar is redoubled in this age of material expansion. Mr. Lazarus talks as if we heard nothing of money in everyday life. The function of the college is not to copy life, but to correct

it. One of the ideas which it must eradicate is the dollar as the goal of existence.

This does not mean that we should fly to the ideal of individual development. Our present largely useless "liberal" education proceeds from our inherited tendency to justify subjects on the ground that they "develop the individual," without testing either to what end they develop or whether they really develop anything at all.

In the light of modern psychology we must ascertain two things. First, what traits we wish to develop. Here the criterion should be social utility or service value. Second, we must test college subjects and college teaching methods to see whether they really produce these traits. Of one thing we may be sure in advance: the fact-cramming method is sure to defeat our aim. Not only are the facts we learn in college largely valueless and largely forgotten, but the fact-cramming. Swallow-and-disgorge, tell-me-what-I-told-you method guarantees the repression of independent thought. We cannot expect the College immediately to reform. In default of that, it behooves every Harvard man, even at the expense of his marks, to do a little original thinking of his own about the problems which he must sooner or later face.  REXFORD S. TUCKER '18