"Mother, fear not! I will save thee!" How it thrilled, the voice of mamagrande, as she repeated the first words of the god! And how it thrilled the little heart of the never-wearied listener! And then:

"The hills repeat the echo of those words. All space shines with a beautiful light, which bathes directly the face of Coatlicue. The assassin remains immobile, and the sister mute with terror, as from the bosom of Coatlicue springs forth a being gigantic, strange. His head is covered with the plumage of hummingbirds; in his right hand he carries the destructive macana, on his left arm the shining shield. Irate the face, fierce the frown. With one blow of the macana he strikes his brother lifeless, and with another his sister, the instigator of the crime. Thus was born the potent Huitzilopochtli, protector-genius of the Aztecs."

And Coatlicue, the gentle Coatlicue of my childish love? Throned in clouds of miraculously beautiful coloring, she was forthwith transported to heaven. Once I voiced the infantile view that the fate of Coatlicue was much more charming than

that of the Virgin Mary, who had remained on this sad earth as the wife of a carpenter; but mamagrande was so distressed, and signed my forehead and her own so often, and made me repeat so many credos, and disquieted me so with. a vision of a feathered Apache coming to carry me off to the mountains, that I was brought to a speedy realization of my sin, and never repeated it. Ordinarily mamagrande would conclude pacifically:

"Such, attentive little daughter mine, is the legend narrated to the Aztec priests by the forests, the waters, and the birds. birds. And on Sunday, when papacito carries thee to the cathedral, fix it in thy mind that the porch, foundation, and courtyard of that saintly edifice remain from the great temple built by our warrior ancestors for the worship of the god Huitzilopochtli. Edifice immense and majestic, it extended to what to-day is called the Street of the Silversmiths, and that of the Old Bishop's House, and on the north embraced the streets of the Incarnation, Santa Teresa, and Monte Alegre. I am a little fatigued, chiquita. Rock thy little old one to sleep."

ROM the kindergarten to the univer

FROM

sity, our present educational system is encountering searching criticism and undergoing radical readjustment. persons of liberal mind will fail to agree that the most auspicious aspect of this revolution is the wide-spread tendency to vitalize education by bringing it into closer contact with the actual life, present and future, of the student, a tendency of which the growth of industrial and agricultural, indeed of all forms of vocational training, is the most striking example. Education in America for the first time gives signs of becoming genuinely democratic. The very persons, however, who welcome these changes most enthusiastically should be the ones to insist

most strenuously that whatever was sound in the old education should not be lost. As one of the chief repositories of this education, the college, together with the department of liberal arts of the university, presents, therefore, a problem of peculiar interest. Two things about the college, at any rate, are certain: it still has a function of supreme importance; it is performing that function at present inefficiently.

What is wrong with the college? As I ask myself that question, I find my mind traveling back to a certain organization of which I was once a member. It was a small group of relatively insignificant persons; and yet, as I have listened in the last few years to reiterated indict

ments of our present collegiate education, I have found the conviction growing within me that that little organization, in its trivial way and on its restricted scale, had caught the secret which the American college has missed.

The wind bloweth where it listeth; the body of which I speak was nothing but a high-school debating-society. It was nothing but a debating-society, but it had got hold of a miraculous power, to define or even to describe which I shall not try. I can only put down a few of its results. It had the knack, somehow or other, of taking raw and callow high-school freshmen and sophomores and instilling into them, sometimes with a suddenness that was startling, a literally furious interest in all sorts of questions, political, social, and ethical, and an equally furious desire to discuss them endlessly. My memory may play me some tricks of exaggeration as I look back, but as I remember it, we boys came to reckon time in those days from one Friday night to the next. In their turmoil and fervor, the meetings themselves stand out in my mind as a sort of vivid contrast, especially in the matter of demands for the floor, with certain prayermeetings I have attended. Social functions, even dances, could not compete with them. If there was an athletic event on a Friday afternoon, the club did not adjourn in the evening to help celebrate the victory. The debate was held as usual, merely with added zest and an access of virtue. No January blizzard was severe enough seriously to impair the attendance. The meetings began on the dot, and ended when it was no longer possible to force or bribe the janitor to keep the building open. Most of my other high-school experiences, much even of my college life, fade into fog and haze compared with the vivid memories of that society. I have no doubt that, in any absolute sense, its meetings were as absurd, its debates as wild and whirling, as any that were ever held. The product, then and there, was useless; but the spirit back of it all! That was authentic. That was, and is, a living thing. I use the word "spirit." But no one word will do. It was a something in the air, an atmosphere, a tradition, a grip, a pressure, an urgency, an uplift, a quickening of the will, an intellectual enthusiasm, an esprit de corps. What one calls

it is of no account. The point is, it is what the American college of to-day is most in need of. And the question is, how is it to get it?

THE UNIFYING INFLUENCE OF
COLLEGE SPIRIT

Now, the first fact to be grasped with regard to this spirit is that, like everything else that is alive, it can inhabit only a body where there is unity. It is no idle chance that the phrase "college spirit" has come in our day to have oftentimes an almost exclusively athletic connotation. The reason is that on the athletic-field we have team-work among the players and unity of interest on the part of all. The conditions for the emergence of an intellectual college spirit are the same. Whatever makes for the intellectual integrity of a college, renders more likely the appearance of this spirit. Whatever impairs that integrity, acts as a potent spell to keep it at a distance.

A normal boy or girl of college age, introduced into an atmosphere of high intellectual pressure, can no more resist it than a bit of coal can avoid incandescence in the furnace. He can no more resist it than a person can resist the hush that falls over an audience in the presence of eloquence, or the spirit of panic, once under way, in the burning theater. A tone and tradition of mental enthusiasm once firmly established in a college, thereafter the predominant set of the current will be from the whole to the parts. But in the meantime the problem is more complex, and calls for more drastic action.

In every college in the country there are at present a large number of students who are intellectually alert. Why, then, do not their individual enthusiasms fuse into that collective enthusiasm of which we speak? There are various reasons, but a fundamental one is the presence among them of a large number of students who have come to college for social reasons, or because, as the phrase runs, it is "the thing to do," or, vaguer still, for no reason at all. We all slip too easily into the feeling that the presence of these students in the college community, while not beneficial, to be sure, is at least not positively harmful. A more fatal blunder could not be committed. They are the intellectual non-conductors that break the circuit, that

insulate the real students from one another, and so prevent the emergence of a mental current. Hence, to get rid of one student who is mentally inert may be of more avail in this matter than to acquire three who are mentally awake. It is at first a question not so much of size and range as of continuity. If a number of old friends look forward to an evening of congenial reminiscence round the fire, it may be more important that all the strangers go than that all the friends remain. The one false note mars the whole melody. The one chilly and unresponsive guest dissipates the spirit of festivity.

THE INCUBUS OF THE IDLE STUDENT

LOOKED at in this light, we see how specious are the arguments which have led us to tolerate the college idler so long. Clinging to the remote hope of his regeneration, we have permitted him to contaminate hundreds with the virus of intellectual listlessness. The time for tolerance is past. War measures are now necessary. The first and crying need of the American college to-day is the ejection, the ruthless ejection, of the man with the idle mind. He is the leper of college society.

Later, when conditions are less desperate, we may be able to treat him more leniently. But, then, the chances are that he will either be converted or will eliminate himself, for college will have become a place where a man with an idle mind will feel as uncomfortable as a churl in fine society. In bringing this condition about, however, we must not lose our sense of distinction. Greater vigilance over the intellectual life of the college must not be interpreted to mean that the poorly prepared student shall never be admitted, or that the man who gets low marks shall be instantly dismissed, or that the girl who is ruining her health over her books shall be tacitly applauded. am not speaking of mental endowment or of mental results. I am speaking of mental hunger, a very different thing. The curve of mental hunger cannot be plotted from statistics in the registrar's office.

I

But all this is not enough. This is only the preparation of the soil. Next there must be the seed, an entire student body open-minded and alert is the indispensa

ble condition; but, as in that little debating-society, above them and around them and within them must be the unifying force of a central intellectual interest. A dozen words and phrases come to the tip of my pen to indicate what this interest might be, but I will not let myself put them down. All are inadequate, and each is bound to arcuse the antagonism of some one who has another name for the same idea. But whatever we call this focusing power, who can doubt that a step of prime importance toward its attainment is the complete abolition of the compartment type of modern college- the college, I mean, made up of intellectually water-tight departments? In other words, we must wage unrelenting war on the spirit of narrow specialization. It was probably necessary, while our universities were being placed on a firm basis, for our colleges to pass through a period of the domination of this spirit. But that necessity is past. Hereafter specialization should be left to the universities and vocational schools; and it should stand out more and more clearly as the duty of the college teacher to humanize his subject, to bring it home to the lives and experience of his students, to relate it to other subjects the study of which they are pursuing. And to this end we must exorcise a superstition that looms in the paththe obnoxious doctrine that largeness of outlook means lack of thoroughness and accuracy; that the presence of imagination means lack of respect for facts. It ought to mean, and it can mean, just the opposite. No one whose mind is healthy loses interest in the towns and cities because he has seen a map of the whole country.

THE ATTITUDE OF THE TEACHER TOWARD HIS SUBJECT

IN this condemnation of the water-tight department I do not mean to include the system of major subjects, or the value of intensive study along some definite line. I refer, rather, to a distinct and easily recognizable attitude on the part of the teacher. Every one who has been through college has undoubtedly had the misfortune to fall into the clutches of at least one extreme example of the type-the man who teaches even the most elementary course in his subject as if all the stu

dents in the class were to give exclusive attention for the rest of their lives to his own particular little province of human knowledge. With the feeling of large leisure that this sense imparts, he begins far from the center, and with correspondingly imperceptible motion proceedswell, the students have no notion whither he is proceeding, for they are plunged into abysmal ignorance as to that part of the intellectual universe into which they have suddenly been dropped. Will not the real college teacher, on the other hand, remember that most of his students are never to follow the subject much further in the classroom and that the probability of their maintaining an interest in it on their own account will depend very largely on the degree to which they grasp it as a whole and the extent to which its relations are made plain to other parts of their experience and other subjects in the curriculum? And if any teacher modestly doubts his ability to treat his material in this way, is not that proof once for all that, whatever his scientific standing in his own field, he is no college teacher?

Fortunately, we have all had teachers of the broader type. It was my own good fortune to have such an instructor in mathematics. I mention it here chiefly because, if mathematics can be humanized, any subject can. It was not that professor's custom to make wide excursions from his subject. It was rather a passing illustration here, an application there, now a telling analogy, now a specially vivid diagram-devices sufficient to touch the thing to vitality, to render the most abstract of subjects the most concrete, until gradually we came to feel mathematical truth as a law permeating all life; and so a realm that might have been one of dead signs and symbols was transmuted into a veritable temple of intellectual beauty. That man was, to the core, a college teacher.

Moreover, there exists the same distinction among students as among teachers. There is the student who in a formal way does well in this subject and in that, but who apparently never dreams that any two of his classrooms are in the same universe. On the other hand, there is the student who stops at the teacher's desk as he comes in to observe that the point the class was discussing last week

came up the next day in a course in economics; or who remarks in the midst of the recitation, "There was a good illustration of that in the morning paper," or, "Is n't that where the middle ages were wiser than we are?" or, "The psychologists have proved that that is n't so"; or who, better yet, is overheard, after the class has been dismissed, continuing the discussion with some fellow-student and bringing in some telling example from literature or chemistry or philosophy or his own experience. This is the type of student that is meat and drink to the teacher; for these are the evidences of mental life -evidences that the course does not stop at the door of the classroom. And this type of student, at the present time especially, is a far better asset to a college than the highest honor student of the merely intensive sort. He is the thread that strings the intellectual beads of the college community. Happy is the institution that can capture a number of his kind.

THE CORRELATION OF HUMAN
KNOWLEDGE VITAL

THIS process of correlating, of vitalizing,
of humanizing knowledge, a process to
which both teachers and students must
contribute, is the very essence of making
education liberal. It is also the essence
of making education practical. Indeed,
is it not about time for us to recognize
that, in any high sense, liberal and practi-
cal mean the same thing? The long con-
flict between the two doctrines of which
these are the watchwords has been due to
the fact that while each stands for a great
truth, each has become identified in many
minds with a great falsehood. The great
truth in the doctrine of the liberal educa-
tion is the perception that power over
things that are large and high and far
away often bestows the best control over
things that are detailed and near.
great error in the doctrine is the false in-
ference that anything that is distant and
removed must, ipso facto, possess that
power. The great truth in the doctrine
of the practical education is the percep-
tion that nothing is worth while that does
not relate itself to the every-day life of
man. Its great error is the belief that the
only things that possess that relationship
are things of an immediate, bread-and-
butter nature. It is not enough, the prac-

The

tical education must remember, that a subject enables a student to get results; those results must be shown to be worth while in the light of human life as a whole. But it is also not enough, the liberal education must remember, that a subject has a relationship to the real and palpitating issues of human life; it is necessary that the student be made to see and feel that connection clearly, constantly, and vitally.

"But how," one asks, "can these things be done? You are demanding at the outset of the college course that which should be its end and consummation." Precisely. That is the paradox that confronts every teacher-the educational paradox, it might be called: the curious fact that only through an interest in the whole can one arouse an interest in the parts; that what logically should be the fruit and outcome must, by a queer twist in the nature of things, be likewise the seed and startingpoint. How, for instance, does a small boy learn the game of base-ball? Why, by learning the game of base-ball, of course. We would never dream of initiating him into the mysteries of that sport by delivering in his presence an elaborate disquisition on the kinds of wood of which base-ball bats may be made. When he has once grasped the game as a whole, however, he will then listen eagerly to the most recondite discussion of anything related to it, whether it be the materials of which bats are made, the principles of the gyroscope, the law of falling bodies, or the biography of some star player of the last generation. He will subject himself to any hardship, physical or mental, to obtain the practical or theoretical knowledge that makes up a real comprehension of the game. But anterior to all this is his interest in the game of base-ball.

SPIRIT SHOULD COME BEFORE DISCIPLINE

THIS simple principle we sometimes seem to lose sight of in our education, consistently putting the cart before the horse. In the days of the Renaissance, when people had caught a vision of a new world, they studied Greek with avidity because they believed it was a path into that world. We reverse the process. We set our students to grinding Greek verbs in order that in an indefinite future they may come in contact with the Hellenic

spirit, when what they wanted was a touch of the Hellenic spirit to transform the Greek grammar into a book of magic. We set them to cutting up earthworms when what they wanted first was to have their thoughts turned toward the mystery of physical life. We put them to studying Italian, trusting that in due time a knowledge of that language may prove an incentive to read Dante, never perceiving that a craving for Dante might be made the strongest incentive for studying Italian. We red-ink and blue-pencil their compositions, believing, with a touching faith, that there is some intrinsic beauty in correct spelling and perfect punctuation that will appeal to the undergraduate mind; and all the while what they needed was a sense, however dim, of the wonder of literary creation.

What is true of the separate subject is true of collegiate education as a whole. We do not go to college to do four years of drudgery in order that the rest of our lives may be made easier and brighter. We go rather to catch a vision that will hold our faces toward the goal even amid the blackest passages of our later experience; for

tasks in hours of insight willed Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.

There, in a couplet, is the whole philosophy of the liberal education, and of its practical relation to after life. Youth is the period of vision. If we deny vision. to our young men, let us not complain later if the people perish.

But the discipline of the old education! What, some one cries, is to become of that? This theory that work should be attractive, what is it but the abominable modern doctrine of making everything interesting, of offering our mental pabulum in predigested form, of bringing everything down to the intellectual level of a baby? Let us not lose our sense of distinction. It is nothing of the sort. I agree that the modern doctrine referred to is abominable. I agree that we must have discipline; that nothing can take the place of the hard task systematically performed, of the difficult obstacle systematically overcome. I even go so far as to believe that it would not be a bad thing to compel every student to pass a few courses that are dis