The New Heresy

In the heyday of the Harvard elective system Le Baron Briggs used to tell of a father who after struggling long and hard with the Dean's office took his son home and set him to work, remarking that he had lacked judgment trying to put a $5,000 education on a $500 boy." In a recent commencement address President Lowell of Harvard gravet developed the same idea, and added, "at present this is heresy" implying that it is somewhat in advance of our time.

The implication is quite justified. What was a humorous anecdole under President Eliot, or at best a twinkling paradox, has become a fundamental principle not only at Harvard but wherever education is advancing. Traditionally, as President Lowell says, we have proceeded "on general principles," assuming that young men are, "for practical (educational) purposes equivalent." Under the elective system, progress was thought to consist in multiplying the number of "courses" provided and the number of instructors. As all students were born equal, so were all subjects. It was a system of laissez faire. Today progress consists in "thinking not of the course but of the student as the unit." Education is measured by the "character energy and ambition" which he develops; and, correspondingly, the ability of a teacher is judged not merely by his contributions to science, but by the inspirational and energizing influence of his teaching. Less broadly elective, education has become "a selective process." No longer the illumined parent but the illumined university says to the $500 boy; "Back to the workshop, back to the farm!"

With becoming modesty toward the elder generation. President Lowell remarks that such "changes in customs, and even in aims and purposes, come not so much from a reversal of principle as from a difference in emphasis." It is quite true that what, in the eyes of Deap Briggs, received the emphasis of the twinkle jocular has now become a commencement oration deeply serious. Yet the orator leaves us no doubt that a great dogma is involved that of our democracy. He is quite consciously subversive. He even protests against the old system as tending to turn there out all of one pattern, like Waltham watches or Ford cars". By and large, however, it cannot be said that philosophy has inspired or even tinged the new movement. The great sister university, though treading the same path of progress fiercely presents the undemocratic implication. In nine colleges out of ten the primum mobile of progress is the mere force of numbers. Confronted by the increasing swarms of Freshmen, they are positively driven to the "selective process."

With becoming modesty toward man-kind as a whole, it may be said that this is its usual process. Revolutions are energized by some actual need, their "general principles" being invoked as an incitement and justification. Like Touch stone, homo sapiens is never aware of his own wit till he breaks his shins against it. Yet the time may come when even college Presidents will no longer think is needful to camouflage a reversal of principle as a more change of emphasis. New York Times.