ESCAPING THE FACT

An editorial in the New York Times, commenting on President Hopkin's defense of the college youth in the current Scribner's, mentions his contention that "this youth is as if to determine between reality, and fallacy, between truth and error, and between sincerity and hypocricy, as he will be at any later time in life." The editorial goes on to say that, "The college must give its undergraduate the guidance of sincere and thorough scholars and help him to become acquainted with the processes by which the world has accumulated its intellectual wealth, but it is a further prescription of one who has confidence in the student's ability to think for himself that he should have experience in hearing, the arguments of extremists and weighing them; for if there is a point of a view which is attracting large groups of men ... there is no better time to become acquainted with it and appraise it than in the undergraduate days, when the whole world of ideas is a forum."

This idea, carried to its logical conclusion, is the basis of Dr. Meiklejohn's experimental college at the University of Wisconsin. To that institution are admitted a limited number of carefully chosen undergraduates, to study under the guidance of tutors, with few lectures, and fewer examinations. But the curriculum, although there is much opportunity for individual reading, is definitely fixed for all. And in these required courses, the emphasis is not upon facts but upon criticism and comparison. The field of knowledge is regarded in its entirely. Whole civilizations, whole movements of thought, are studied, and the final comparison is always with the life of today. No art, no science is considered solely for itself, but in its relative aspect. While accumulating, if unconsciously, a body of facts, the student "meet the classic requirement of seeing life steadily and seeing it whole."

The obvious and fully justifiable criticism of such a program is that it is superficial. Psychologists can prove to their own satisfaction that a man's intelligence quota, his ability to deal with facts and situations is constant throughout life. With this in view, to ground him in facts, to give him tools with which to work, would seem the logical means of education. True, an intelligent tutor or stimulating lecturer can often awaken the dormant perceptive and critical faculties. But to let them play unconfined over impossibly wide fields of knowledge for several years, without any strict disciplining of the retentive powers, which are susceptible to improvement, appears but a waste of time. And this is the widely heralded tendency of a humanistic education whose graduates are deplorably inferior in actual knowledge to the products of the colleges of a century or two ago.