EDUCATIONAL REVIEW

NOVEMBER, 1891.

I.

THE POLICY OF THE SMALL COLLEGE.

Now that we have the germs, more or less developed, of eight or ten universities, the college must prepare to take second place in our educational system. To ape the university, and try to spread over the whole field of higher education; or to be jealous of the university, and set up as its rival, is equally absurd and suicidal. Its proper policy is to accept with modesty and self-respect its new position; and by losing the old life of self-sufficient independence, to find the new life of membership in the highly differentiated educational organism of which the kindergartens are the feet and the university is the head.

There are three classes of educated persons. First, those whose knowledge of reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography, modern history, descriptive science, and their native language and literature, enables them to do ordinary business, to enter good society, and to enjoy periodical and popular literature. Second, those whose knowledge of ancient and modern languages and literatures, higher mathematics, experimental science, political and economic history, psychology, ethics, and sociology, enables them to grasp the principles of medicine or law or politics or theology; to guide social progress and form public opinion; to enjoy the companionship of wise and good men of all lands and ages; and to appreciate the results in some department of scientific investigation or historical research. Third, those whose special training qualifies them to discover and interpret new truth. within some chosen field of knowledge.

To make scholars of the first class is the business of the school; to make scholars of the second class, and to discover and encourage those capable of entering the third class, is the business of the college; to train the chosen few who constitute the third class into full possession of productive powers, is the business of the university.

Assuming that the college has this clear consciousness of its intermediate position between school and university, and of its twofold office to train the majority of its students for scholarly professional and business life, and to discover in the few capacity for exclusively scholarly careers, let us see what its policy will be on such vital points as the conditions of admission, the course of study, the conferring of degrees, the composition of the faculty, the mode of government, and the spirit of the institution.

In determining the conditions of admission, the college has in view two ends which in the present state of secondary education are often inconsistent. First, to secure thorough training; and second, to make close and natural connection with the course of study pursued by the average student in our academies and high schools. In order to secure the requisite training the majority of Eastern colleges insist on specified amounts of Latin, Greek, and mathematics as the substance of their requirement. This requirement, however, does not coincide with the course of the average student in the high school. Unless, by the time a boy is thirteen, his parents have picked out a college career for him, he studies. in the high school history, science, French, or German, neglecting Greek, and perhaps Latin, altogether. Then by the time he is seventeen he finds himself hopelessly cut off from a college course.

Why, then, does not the college recognize these studies as substitutes for the traditional requirements? For two reasons: one bad, and one good. The bad reason is that Latin, Greek, and mathematics, having been for generations the traditional requirements, have become the objects of superstitious veneration.

The good reason is that the average high school is not yet equipped, either in teachers or apparatus, to make the study of history, science, and modern languages the means of that thorough training which they are able to give by means of Greek and Latin.

There are schools in southern New England, and a few elsewhere, in which science and modern languages are so taught as to give the requisite training; and colleges which draw largely from these schools are justified in allowing the substitution of these studies for portions of the traditional requirement. The average college is not justified in such a course at present.

The change is destined to become universal in the near future. As soon as the high schools are able to teach experi. mental science, French, and German as well as they now teach Greek and Latin, it will be the policy of the college to require for admission mathematics and English as at present; ability to read easy prose at sight in Latin, and either Greek, French, or German, and evidence of a thorough course in experimental science. We shall then have a considerable number of students fitting for college in the high schools, who will be for the most part in the same classes with the students who are not intending to enter college, instead of the small number who pursue a separate course, and thus receive an undue amount of the time of the teacher, and an unjust proportion of the public school fund.

This modification in requirement will necessitate some corresponding modifications in the course of study. It will be necessary to offer an elementary course in Greek, as well as in German and French, for those who wish to begin this study after admission to college. There should be a course in the history, literature, mythology, and archæology of Greece required of every student who has not studied the Greek language as a part of his preparatory or college course.

The multiplication of highly specialized electives is not the province of the college. The expense is too great, and the profit to students at this stage too small.

There are two fundamental lines of scholarly interest, and two corresponding types of mind: the literary and the scientific.

The college should by its required courses insure to every student an acquaintance with the first principles in both these fundamental lines of study. The college may wisely require of its candidates for a degree, ability to read both French and German, to write correct English, the elements of political and economic science, psychology, and ethics, on the side of the literature and life of man; and higher algebra, geometry and trigonometry, and the elements of chemistry, physics, and biology, on the side of mathematics and physical science.

For the remaining half of the course sufficient electives should be offered to allow concentration on either literary or scientific studies according to the taste and interest of the individual student.

Such a readjustment of the conditions of admission and the course of study, together with improved methods of teaching in the lower schools, will allow pupils to enter college a year or two earlier than at present. No shortening of the course will be necessary. The difference between the best academies and high schools and those of inferior grade, will express itself by the increased number of students who will enter college a year in advance.

A. B. should be the ordinary college degree, and it should be given without reference to the precise nature of the course pursued. The degree means simply that the recipient is a liberally educated man. Attempts to discriminate between the educational value of courses of equal length and thoroughness in the same institution of liberal learning are relics of an educational superstition from which it is high time to emancipate ourselves.

In order to encourage continued study during the year immediately following graduation, the college is justified in granting the degree of A. M. to graduates who give evidence of having done the equivalent of a year's graduate study.

Beyond this the college has no right to go. It owes to its undergraduates the full expenditure of its income and the full time of its professors. And if it attempts to divide its strength between graduates and undergraduates, it does an injustice to both. It is the duty of the small college to drive away graduates who desire a prolonged course of systematic instruction, to larger institutions which make graduate instruction their main concern.

The degree of Ph. D. no mere college has a right to confer; and the conferring of this degree by institutions which make no adequate provision for graduate instruction is the gravest breach of educational propriety.

If sparingly and judiciously conferred, the honorary degrees of D. D. and LL. D. give fitting recognition to distinguished services to church and state by sons of the college and prominent public servants and benefactors in its immediate vicinity.

The most important department of college policy is the appointment of professors. The first lesson a college president has to learn is the comparative worthlessness of even the highest testimonials and letters of recommendation. Testimonials stand to fitness for a college professorship as naturalization papers to fitness for membership in Congress. They are things no candidate who is a stranger should be without; but they by no means indicate the desirability of his election.

Those young colleges which are rapidly filling their faculties with any and every applicant who comes gowned in a thesis and capped with a degree, and bringing in his grip a batch of testimonials from university professors, will soon discover to their sorrow that it takes more than knowledge of a specialty to make a good college professor, and more than an aggregation of specialists to constitute a faculty.

The chief business of the college is to train young men for active life; and a good proportion of a college faculty should be men who have gained maturity of character through experience in the great school of life; men who have studied a profession, or interested themselves in some practical social