DONNERSCHLAG

The phrensied ferment which has stirred the academic world for the last decade, resulting in housing plans and semesterless colleges and what not, gives no promise of dying out. Even at Harvard enough is not enough, for seemingly seven refulgent copies of the Adelon, or Liberty Hall, or the Bastille, are not sufficient to top the pyramid of reading periods and tutorial systems and courses in aerial photography. The necessity for further reform in the tutorial system indicates that the product, the graduate, of the present-day college is far from satisfactory.

And so he is. What ails the colleges seems to most a deep and occult mystery, but it is patent to all that the college student is alike an affliction to himself and to the world. Whether he be the gin-drinking, neurotically erotic, three-gallons-of-gas-and-a-dark-lane sort, or the sweet grind sedulously poring his neuter way through dusty tomes, or one of the infinite gradations between, he is a sorry confection to send out into the great world to take his place in the ruling class. He has no ideals worthy of the name, and of most subjects with which an educated gentleman should be familiar he has a terrifying unknowledge. Of art, science, literature, history, politics, and philosophy he may know one thoroughly, have a smattering of another, and be profoundly ignorant of the rest.

One may rashly venture to choose the student as the prime cause of Higher Education's failure in America; if he is, the college can do nothing to remedy matters but attempt to improve him; improving what it offers him is futile. President Eliot, moved by a mistaken faith in mankind, tried to give his students opportunity to round out their knowledge. President Lowell attempted to force them to acquire a little Kultur. The disease seems to have been too severe for such homeopathic doses. It is now clear that to improve the product of the curriculum there must be improvement in its raw material. If the college today would work improvements it would best begin by agitating energetically for a reliable, thorough and uniform system of kindergarten, primary, and secondary schools, which can be trusted to train boys for scholarship. Until such changes are made every college, Harvard included, will stifle under the incubus of elementary or survey courses, the English 28's, and History 1's, and German. A's, which only make up the deficiencies of preparation. As long as these courses must exist it is neither necessary to substantiate the statement that the American preparatory schools are the worst in the western world, nor to catalogue and examine the wretchedness of those Dotheboys Halls which can supply only with difficulty the paltry store of trite facts necessary for the inadequate college entrance examinations. As long as these courses are necessary the student who is interested in knowledge apart from grades or gin will be as rare as that missing link, the civilized American. As long as such courses are necessary, academic reform will only the more foolhardily attempt that palpable impossibility, the administration of a complete education in four years.