College and Church Pay Him Homage

To President Eliot belongs the honor of having brought the college study of America into close and active contact with its public work and business life.

Seldom has a single man achieved such a large reform. Others have tried to do this very thing, notably Thomas Jefferson in his plans for the University of Virgiuia, but Charles William Eliot was the first who succeeded.

Prior to his day the college course was a thing apart by itself--a survival of the past. Its classrooms were the scene of keen competition among a few high stand men; its studies were a source of dignified pleasure to those who had a taste for books. But they had no bearing, or very little, on the life which the student was to lead afterwards. His preparation for politics or business lay in the extra-curriculum activity of the place, not in its direct teaching. Charles William Eliot demanded that the teaching should be interesting; that it should be so arranged as to appeal to the student for its own sake and have some relation to the things which he was going to do with himself afterward. We may differ with him as to some of his theories of teaching or some of his ideas as to what the college course should emphasize; for like most successful reformers, he had a rather blind faith in his own cherished principles. We may even doubt the usefulness of the elective system, as he carried it out. But no one can have any doubt whatever of the salutary effect of his ideas and his forceful presentation of these ideas on American colleges as a whole and American life as a whole. He woke the college classrooms up to an interest in what was going on outside of them and he at the same time led the outside world to see and value what college study really could do for it.

For his work was by no means a one-sided one. He not only taught the undergraduates practical subjects, he taught the students of law and medicine the theoretical subjects which they needed to know. He made people see that the best physician was the man who had been grounded in Pathology, the best lawyer the man who had grasped the principles of law instead of Meting himself be swamped by details. To quote a current phrase he "put learning on the map" in more senses than one. To him more than to any other man--I had almost said "more than to all other men--America owes it that her system of higher education is no longer a thing apart by itself a soft of "Ark of the Covenant" too sacred to be touched but a normal part of the life of the nation as a whole.