THE STUDENTS PRESCRIBE

Edward C. Aswell '26 has written certain of his views on education for the November issue of the "Forum". They are interesting, intelligent, and, to all who are vitally concerned with American education, vastly suggestive. Yet like most of the views of both young and old advocates of educational reform, they smack too much of the general and too much of the arbitrary.

Mr. Aswell sees all the difficulty in modern college training, all the reaction to that difficulty, indeed, the whole matter, as merely one ramification of the whole struggle, as he terms it, between religion and education. Here he lays himself open to attack from those who, and they are many, see the categorical impossibility of a struggle between religion in its broadest sense and science in its broadest scene. Unless Mr. Aswell can prove there is such a struggle, and he certainly has not done so in this particular article, he has based his ideas on the false foundations of an unproven, though still contended, generality.

In his diagnosis of the present situation -- which is most nearly that of Harvard, since Mr. Aswell knows best this University--he fails to explain the effect of the introduction of the elective system into the American university, and the eventual result of a preponderance of minute which must be gathered in some form for the digestion of the student.

What the college needs, he believes, is a general course in philosophy for the founding of a "philosophy of life" in the particular student, based upon the great philosophies of all time. Here he apparently believes that a college student should gain at college a pattern for life which will improve later years. To reduce this to its simplest form one must state: that Mr. Aswell wants a college or university to give a student from its lecture platforms a working basis for his life work. He distinguishes a vocational school from a university by just that fact: a vocational school need not teach philosophy.

Now philosophy is one approach to what Plato would call the Universal. There are those for whom it is the only approach. But others must gain their open sesame to, or glimpse of the Universal by means of their own ability which may not be philosophical at all. Furthermore, a Vermont herdsman may have reached such a philosophy without ever hearing the best lectures of the most synthetic mind. College or university must exist for more than this. Mr. Aswell sees things too clearly. His college would be too efficient, too limited in perspective.

The rest of the article, at least that which concerns what Mr. Aswell calls the "human", probably meaning the humanistic, is more sound. Here his desire to get nearer the Universal, to see Unity in Multiplicity, though it be a reiteration of Mr. Irving Babbitt's reiterations of a truth so evident as to be too often neglected, is always excellent in the present absence of sanity in journalistic criticism.

The article, then, is on the whole, interesting, intelligent, but a trifle dogmatic, a trifle nearer the biased than one could wish. Unless one be clear about the difference between credal religion and religion in the large, unless one derides science, he gets but a short way in discussing either or bath, especially when he relates the difficulties of modern education so closely to them. Mr. Aswell forgets that, though he be at an impressionable stage while at college, the student cannot hope to gain a formula for future existence and a road map from college. He can get less easily catalogued gifts experience of mental freedom, the contact with cultivated minds (nor are they all dull or completely parched), the ability to adjust interests on some saner scale, the small but glorious gleam of reality which even the barest learning or the continued application of tobacco, friendship, and intelligence sometimes engenders. Mr. Aswell has too much faith in the American college student as a reformer, too little as a college student.