LOST OPPORTUNITIES

How many times a Senior in reviewing his College career has thought of the opportunities he might have seized, of the benefit he might have derived from the courses he happened to follow. Such things, however, are behind him, and he seldom reconsiders them. He followed a fixed course of training, distributed and concentrated his labors as the rules required, and he is given a certificate at the end to show that he is an educated man, which, after all was the specific thing he worked for. Why should he investigate further?

If, however, he should look into the matter thoroughly he could probably assign the cause of his missed opportunities to a poor understanding of his elementary courses. May we blame the instructors for this phenomenon? Considering the American system of education in its entirety it would be impossible to assert that preparatory courses are as generally inefficient as the information of the men would seem to indicate. And yet it is not right to place all the blame on the student. Perhaps the inducement to the intelligent appreciation of a course are not what they should be.

When we think of our poor grounding and of the good we might have had from a given study the phrase that comes to us is "If I had only known!" If we had only known what fine things lay ahead how much better would have been our beginning. And yet how were we to tell? How were we to know when we started our beginners' Latin or Greek, studying the dullest sort of composition, of the glories of classic thought and poetry. This purposeless choice and following of our elementary courses can account for more wasted time than any one factor in our academic training.

It might be difficult to give a High School student a just appreciation of the possibilities of his subject; in college there is little excuse for not doing so. College, after all, is or ought to be the important stage of our training, the stage which, once, reached, should forbid our wasting time any further. It is not enough, then, for an institution to offer a good system of preparation. Out of fairness to both students and professors a better means should be contrived of revealing the opportunities that lie behind a prosaic statement in the catalogue.