THE ACADEMIC FORWARD PASS

That the American university system needs an intellectual forward pass in needs an intellectual forward pass in its educational scrimmages is the mystical pronouncement of L. F. Abbott in the current outlook; he reinforces it with the instance of a Yale man, reared in France, who used French subjunctives as naturally as if he had been their inventor, yet failed in a course because he did not know the rule for their use. Using college board examinations as the prototype of hide-bound education, he seems to be deeply moved by the spectacle of so many young men marching doggedly, through the woods of college with nothing but a collection of crooked sticks in their arms at commencement.

To some extent Mr. Abbott is justified in regarding college board examinations as a symbol of all that is arbitrary and antiquated in American education. The necessity for securing certain grades in certain subjects, dealing only with the bare bones of languages and mathematics, forces preparatory schools into cramming and gives an opportunity to the professional tutor who can get anyone into a given college and keep him in after he gets there. The University's one-seventh plan is an attempt at lubricating the present entrance system; the recent action of the college board itself in planning intelligence tests for the future has a similar intention behind it, however doubtful the efficiency of intelligence tests may be. Forces are at work to amend matters. It is difficult to prophesy what they will accomplish.

Yet the problem was there long before the college board was thought of and will probably still be there long after the board is defunct. How can education be humanized? how can the Greek operative and the French subjunctive be made so translucent that they do not obscure the beauty of literature for the average person who studies them? Able educators realize the problem with a professional keenness probably beyond the reach of Mr. Abbott's amateur interest; if they solve it, the cons of the present college generation will have nothing but pity for the academic benefits which their fathers derived from college.