The Student and Real Life

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

You may be willing to admit to your paper the following comment on contemporary Cambridge life. There have been a series of very important and very impressive lectures held at Radcliffe College under the auspices of the League of Women Voters.

The lectures were by distinguished people especially qualified to diacunn the present state of the world which in parlous. The human race is undoubtedly possessed by a variety of devils and in engaged in "racing" toward that steep place which seems to have always attracted the insane.

Very good, who listened to these remarkable statements? The hall was filled--as they say Pasadena is filled--with elderly people and their parents--with people whose day was over. Where were the Radcliffe girls? Where were the people who would participate in the future of humanity and who should be informed, and fully informed, on these intensely personal issues--personal for themselves and for their children later?

Probably engaged in studying for examinations.

I wish to ask if that is the best we can do in the education of Youth today?

What is this idea of scholarship which produces such illusions and permits girls and boys who have fifty years to live to bury themselves in books while the people who will be wholly out of the picture are listening to experts discuss the most vital and immediate matters with which they have only a tenuous and very temporary connection?

It occurs to me to add that the College Houses could and should be vitalized and justified by having such speakers as these, frequent guests there.

The detachment of academic life from real life at this time is too apparent to pass by without comment and I therefore make mine. The CRIMSON might follow the thing up a little--particularly along the line of adding this sort of thing to the House Plan. Edward Yeomans.

Cambridge, Mass, January 29.