TEACHING THE TEACHER

There really isn't anything particularly astonishing in the news that a prominent university president decries snap courses, especially if that man be President Lowell. But the metropolitan newspapers thought the information sufficiently alarming to warrant long stories and topcolumn head lines. There is a significance in his words, however, which though lacking in immediate appeal reflects a fundamental American educational problem. It is the fact that President Lowell was talking to school masters and giving them a little of the cool, hard headed advice which has begun to have its effect in institutions of higher learning.

Before the colleges call go much farther, however, they must have more satisfactory material sent up to them from secondary schools. It is during the four or five pre-college year that one's habits of study and interest in learning are most easily formed. Theoretically it should be the time for "quickening the appetite for intellectual things, making men realize that working hard is worth while." But owing to the many complications arising in our present system, it is not until a man gets to college that anything like this happens, and how often it is then too late. Admittedly the problem of secondary education in America is a hard one. The "tyranny of fashion" which President Lowell points to as so easy under a democracy, is one of these difficulties. The great numbers and the differing abilities of those involved increases the trouble. No wonder that untried theory and visionary experiment find wider acceptance among the secondary schools than in the colleges. The teachers feel that there must be some golden way out, and they are willing to try anything that offers, even to searching about and finding something that the pupil will like rather than helping him to like what time has proved most likely to be valuable. Without much doubt there has been too much of this sort of thing: and President Lowell as head of one of the colleges in America which has been most successful in instilling an "appetite for intellectual things" is well qualified to spread a more reasonable gospel among the secondary schools.