MR. ERSKINE REFLECTS

"To discriminate, to derive a sense of values from experience longer and wider than our own, would be the first of a liberal education," writes Mr. John Erskine in the current New Republic. This definition is sound enough, and Mr. Erskine's contention that the college curriculum is over-crowded with courses on second-rate subjects also points to a danger in modern education. His solution of the problem is to cut the curriculum down to a study of a few great men of all ages.

Although Emerson's dictum that "all history is biography" lends the weight of precedent to Mr. Erskine's plan, he has tried to make the lives of great men cover too large a territory. As Mr. Erskine himself says, the great men and great ideas of all time have not been numerous, and they could easily be included in one college course. The mistake lies in supposing that simply because these men represent the best, a study of them will teach discrimination. That virtue may be taught just as well by comparing a second-rate man with a man of genius, as by absorbing a high standard and then referring every question to that ideal.

Under the system which Mr. Erskine proposes, the student would study a few great isolated men, and a little of their immediate environment, but he would get no idea of the continuity of history. Each great man is a product of his environment, and if he represents the synthesis of a movement, is as unrevealing if studied by himself as the answer with-out the mathematical problem. It takes a long series of incidents to make the time ripe for a great man, and since he must be studied in the light of the long movement which brought him forth, the study of great men becomes after all the old chronological method so much despise by Mr. Erskine.