WORKADAY LEARNING

Of all the improvements suggested by experimental educators, none seems more horrible than the system devised by Mr. Holt, President of Rollins College in Florida, and described by him in the Yale News. In his charge that the present system is deplorable because "it quizzes the student instead of the professor, and makes the faculty mere receptacle." President Holt may be justified. But it's tenitive is a bolus hard to ewallow. At Rollins the student has an eight hour working day, and Is made to live up to it." In four two-hour periods under the galdance of an instructor he studies or discusses his work, and "when he has completed his daily periods, like workers in a shop or office, he is through."

The advantages of this plan are enumerated by its author. It abolishes the possibility of flagrant neglect of work; it changes the professor from a quizzer to a guide; it removes the threat of periodic examinations and of the cramming that anticipates them; and for the old lock-step education it substitutes individual freedom of movement. Although President Holt in criticizing the recitation and lecture system of Yale and Harvard is brave and heralded in combatting the present movement toward complete freedom in study, his retrogression toward the grammar school is quite unacceptable. The virtue of final examination is at present a subject of persistent editorial inquiry by the Yale News, and its conclusions bear out the findings of President Holt. But in comparison with grubbing study in shakkles with an instructor who firmly guides the hand of the mind, and with a twilight release which connotes glad forgetfulness of the whirring wheels, the leisured freedom in first acquirement, and the resolution and at least partial digestion of facts that come with the comprehensive answering of final examinations still give the present system a ruddy healthfulness that goes ill with President Holts proffered pall of death.