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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. The
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-

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.

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"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

tinctly disagreeable, though I would immediately add that it is a good rule for every teacher to leave to his colleagues the duty of providing the collegiate bill of fare with these unpalatable dishes.

But one need not make a task disagreeable in order to get discipline out of it. One merely has to make it hard. We must rid our minds of the superstition that to make work attractive deprives it of its difficulty. To make it easy may make it attractive; but to make it attractive is not necessarily to make it easy. A few years ago I heard of a college student who quite voluntarily spent his whole Christmas vacation in a finally successful attempt to solve a single problem in the integral calculus. The subject had been made fascinating to him. That did not make the problem any easier; it merely would not let him give it up.

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The truth at the heart of the whole matter, however, may be seen in its simplest form in the case of children. mother tells her little girl to pick up her blocks, which lie scattered on the floor. The child pouts and gives no sign of obeying. The mother suggests that the blocks are stones and the basket a deep well, with the result that all the stones are in the well within a minute. The example is a trivial one, but the principle it illustrates is at the root of human achievement. Education will reckon ill if it leaves it out. Let us go the whole way with the most orthodox, therefore, in the demand that college work be made difficult; but let us also go the whole way with the most revolutionary in their demand that it be made human and appealing. Then we can preach the gospel of the joy of work without fear that it may degenerate into the perilous doctrine that a man should labor only at the tasks for which he has an inclination, develop only in the direction along which he is already well endowed by nature.

Now, in conclusion, as we return from these reflections on things as they ought to be to the conditions that actually exist, we realize how deep is the discrepancy. When I try for a moment to picture the American college as it is, I find that it comes before my imagination as a heterogeneous collection of detached groups.

Here, in a dormitory room, dimly visible through clouds of tobacco smoke, are

a dozen undergraduates discussing batting averages or listening to a large man on a couch who is explaining in detail how the foot-ball game of the afternoon was lost. Here is a lonely figure, a note-book under his arm, emerging late at night from the chemical laboratory. Here, in the hall outside the classroom, is a group of young men and maidens filling out dance-programs. Here is a pale girl at her desk, her head wrapped in a towel, cramming her memory with German irregular verbs. Here are four men about a table in a fraternity house exulting over the recent capture of an important college office from their rival. Here, late in the evening, are two other men preparing copy for the college paper. Here are three young women boarding a trolley-car on their way to a social settlement in the city. Here- But why go on? Any one of us can continue the picture, or, rather, the pictures, for the whole point is that the thing is plural and not singular. Every one of these things, we recognize, is in its own place and proper measure commendable; but in their detached and exaggerated form they indicate what a travesty our colleges are of what they ought to be.

THE STUDENT SHOULD HAVE A VITAL INTEREST IN LIFE

"OF what they ought to be." As I let that phrase linger in my mind, there comes before me another picture. Again it is a group of students. I am not sure whether they are gathered about the teacher's desk after the recitation or are lingering at the table after the dessert or are sprawling in various postures, long after they ought to be in bed, in some dormitory room. The place is unessential. All I know is that they are discussing. they are discussing. History is hurling the lie at economic theory. Economic theory is retorting in like kind. Religion is coming to the deadly grapple with science. Philosophy is endeavoring to arbitrate a dispute between biology and psychology. The modern is touching shoul-ders, now amicably, now belligerently, with the ancient. Mathematics and metaphysics and music and poetry are comparing their points of agreement and differ

ence.

It is that old high-school debating-society, only on a grander scale, exalted, purged of its grosser absurdities, with

wider interests, in closer contact with facts and the authority of experience, its spirit of argument not exactly gone, but transmuted and sublimated out of a narrow, logical dialectic into a loftier and more tolerant intellectual curiosity.

As I let the picture linger in my imagination, I realize that those students are not alone. Behind them and above them there are spirits present: the men and women, the ideas and purposes, that, in whatever sphere of activity, are shaping the life of the present and opening paths into the future; and beyond and far outnumbering these, the master minds and master conceptions of the past. An ordinary college room has suddenly been transformed into the forum of the ages.

Here Darwin rubs shoulders with Empedocles, Charlemagne with Cæsar, the Mosaic law with the Mendelian. Here Nietzsche passes judgment on St. Paul, and Prometheus is confronted with the superman. Here Marconi and Mozart sit at the feet of Pythagoras, and Plato at the feet of William James. Here, in this debate of the centuries, is made plain the subtle bearing of Democritus on democracy and the occult relations that connect Pericles and Pompeii and Pasteur, Rembrandt and Ibsen, Copernicus and Cromwell, Mephisto and the Sphinx.

Here

Heraclitus expounds the Revelation of St. John the Divine, and Tacitus and Ferrero discuss the philosophy of history. Herefor the vision grows even more grotesque -we behold Archimedes criticizing the theories of Mr. Frederick W. Taylor, and Mr. Taylor in turn explaining to Hamlet why he was inefficient. Here Duns Scotus, warmly seconded by Mr. Dooley, reopens his old feud with the Delphic Sibyl, and we hear, at last, the comments of Karl Marx on the battle of Marathon. Here we detect Jack Falstaff in close communion with St. Francis, and trace the hidden influence of Peter the Hermit on Voltaire. Here Mr. Luther Burbank exhibits his chrysanthemums to Aristotle, and Mr. Pickwick appears to Mrs. Piper in a trance. Here

"But this," some one impatiently exclaims, "is mere insanity." It is quite the opposite. It is the very diversity that insures the sanity of the seeker after truth. It is the very plurality that renders unity. safe. For it is out of just such far-fetched

juxtapositions, out of just such contrasts, paradoxes, incongruities, and conflicts, out of just such warfare of the lower orders of knowledge, that there emerges that higher knowledge for which there is no adequate name, but which makes up that something that is at once mental justness, the power of criticism, the standard of selection, creative vision, wisdom, philosophy-philosophy not in the modern and pedantic, but in the ancient and bracing, signification of the term.

And this it is, more fundamentally than anything else, that the student comes to college to .attain. He comes not to acquire the superficial polish of a useless culture; not to be transformed into one more crack-brained, pettifogging researcher; not to heap up a little pile of information, or to acquire a few tricks of skill, which a few years later can be converted, unit for unit, into bread and butter. He comes rather to acquaint himself with the problems of the world as it now is, to make his own all that is choicest in the inheritance of the past, and to catch a vision of the world as it ought to be; and to do all these things not for their own sakes, but to the end that when he approaches his own particular task in the practical world, he may bring to it background, amplitude, imagination, grasp, the combined daring and restraint, serenity and tenacity, of the disciplined mind.

HERE is at least a partial program for the regeneration of the American college:

(1) Eject from the student body the intellectually inert.

(2) Eliminate from the faculty the narrow specialist, who at his best belongs to the university, at his worst is a pedant.

(3) Encourage, among teachers and students, in the classroom, and still more out of it, every influence that tends to unify, to socialize, to humanize knowledge. And let it be remembered - for I have not forgotten that little debatingclub-that one important means to this end is simply the creation of a current of vital ideas. Let every one talk, then, talk ardently and endlessly, each about the subject of his special interest, but all about that larger something in which these special interests inhere, and for which, indefinite as the term is, we have no better name than life.

"SNOW QUEEN"

BY WILLIAM ROSE BENÉT

YELLOW catkins on the sallows
In the osiered river-shallows,
But the sunshine and the swallows
Doubt the death of little Kay.
As they counsel, Gerda follows
On a gray March day.

Where the reeds grow tall and rank
On the pebbly river-bank.

Gerda flings her small red shoes
To the river for its news.

Have you seen my little comrade?
But the river floweth fleet,
And her shoes return on ripples
To the pebbles at her feet.

Withholding still their oracle,
The chuckling ripples chide.
But see, a fisher's coracle
Is rocking on the tide!

Gerda seeks it. Yet once more

To the tide her shoes she flings,

And they float in widening rings;

But the waves withhold their lore

From the wee one as before.

Then she turns in sudden terror.

She is drifting from the shore!

Oh, the garden, little Gerda, where the flower-tales were told,
The princess, and the ravens, and the magic sleeping-hall,
The royal guards in silver lace, the lackeys all in gold-
You foresee them not at all;

Nor, further to befall,

The robber-maiden's reindeer, nor the chill enchanted sights
In the Snow Queen's frozen palace of a thousand northern lights;
But Kay shall yet be rescued from her cold and cruel thrall.

Shining angels of your innocence your childish steps attend

To disperse the white snow-goblins. And the mirror-fragments dance

To spell the word Eternity, and free your little friend,

Through the magic of your tears for him, your warm, love-brimming glance. In the realm of true romance

Can your perfume ever fail

To float like rose-leaves round us from the old, old fairy-tale?

For this trusting child and small, Hans of Denmark, be thou blest,
Who could talk to children all, north or south or east or west,

And discern their purest sweetness; and can draw our smiles and tears
After all these many years!

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