AREOPAGITICA

Knowledge ladled out in spoon-fed doses, like the brimstone and treacle of Dotheboys Hall, is a thing of the past, but in certain history and sociology the evil influence of the ancient Trivium and Quadrivium remains. These atavistic tendencies are manifest, not in any narrowness or compulsion in the inculcation of ideas, but in the insulation from more than one view of the subjects studied, shown in the assignments of seventy-three pages in one book, one-hundred-and-ninety-nine in another, consecutively covering historical periods, perhaps of Tudor England, or of ante-bellum America. It is obvious that this method gives but one view of the subject, and that view may or may not be adequate; the student depends implicity, upon the good faith and ability of the professor who chooses the reading, who so often assures his classes that the work has been selected because it is "interesting." This is a system which is indeed necessary in survey courses, but for courses covering relatively small periods, even, for example, History 5, there is opportunity for a more mature method.

A plan often followed in teaching such courses in other colleges bears consideration. The student of history is furnished, not with a syllabus measuring off pages in a text book that the lecturer may intone "Read your Fishah, gentlemen, read your Fishah!" but with a cursory outline of the course, and a general bibliography. Armed with these the industrious are expected to disinter for themselves the body and substance of the subject; the less able and the lazy perish by the wayside, for cramming is almost impossible. This is the method by which all real study is accomplished, and it has the advantage of preventing the student's point of view from being warped by opinions which may be peculiar to any individual or school of historians.

Whatever substitute is adopted, the present system is doomed and must go. It is impossible to maintain one's intellectual integrity while reading only one side of a question, and most economists, sociologists, and historians represent only one side of the problems which they treat. The handling of the history of the American Civil War, to cite one instance, has till only very recently been replete with prejudice and bias, fictions and mistakes, merely because most of the men who dealt with the subject were Northerners, incapable of analyzing events and trends truthfully. Not even Hans Sachs would have to point the moral.