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THE COLLEGE IDEAL.
citizens. Unless we accept and practice the doctrines of Communism in its largest sense and to its fullest extent, it is evident that some men will always command and others always obey. Well and good; then let us see to it that those who rule shall command nothing against reason, that those who obey shall be led neither in fear nor in ignorance. Let the leadership be that of the best; and let it be the ambition of the College Ideal that the men whom it trains shall be the best,the best leaders,the best thinkers,the best and most broadly cultured men. Let us see how well our present system does this. Let us examine the American college and see wherein it differs from the College Ideal.
In the first place it seems to me that we begin to specialize all too early. We forget the tiresomeness of one-ideaed men, we forget that the well cultured man has all his faculties so trained that no one of them is unpleasantly prominent. True culture holds in equilibrium qualities of intellect, of manual skill, of reflection, of execution. "Culture is the harmony of a well-tuned mind and heart."
Some may object that the field of knowledge has become so wide, that the realm of thought has grown so vast that no mind can now comprehend it all, that Admirable Crichtons are now an impossibility. Very true, and I for one believe that they always were an impossibility. Human conditions and limitations are such that no man can be all things and know all things. But it is the business of the college—of the college, not of the University—so to train its pupils that they shall be alert and versatile in intellect, so that each, while he follows out his own peculiar bent, may not make that inclination a monomania.
The student who attempts to make special training a substitute for general culture, stunts and dwarfs some part of his intellect. One may find most intellectual pleasure in mathematics, but must he therefore neglect all things else and live in an atmosphere of circles and equations? Another may find delight in classics, but is he therefore to bury himself in dust heaps of antiquity, and lose all consciousness of the present? Another may see his best work
in sciences, but shall he therefore become such a walking catalogue of genera and species, such a volume of chemical formulae that he can neither understand nor appreciate:
"The surge and thunder of the Odyssey "
There will always be enough specialists. There will always be enough men who have forty words for one idea, who die lamenting that they have not devoted their lives to the dative case, who prefer measuring a butterfly's antennae to watching its flight through the summer air, who looking on a gorgeous evening sky will speculate on the chemical composition of the sun, who ask of the best poetry, "What is it worth?" These, like the poor, we have always with us.
Again, it may be objected that teaching of many things is teaching in vain. The pupil gets but a smattering; has no interest in many studies; it is so much time lost that had better be employed in forwarding his progress in the line of work to which his mind is especially adapted. But how are we to know what this line is? If every child came into this world with the occupation to which its inherited brain was especially adapted stamped upon its forehead, the work of the school master would be enormously simplified. But we have to do with human beings possessing a variety of mental characteristics, not with machines adapted and modeled to a special purpose. So that Dr. Arnold, held by many to be the model English schoolmaster, has wisely said: "It is so hard to begin anything in after life, and so comparatively easy to continue what has been begun, that I think we are bound to break ground, as it were, into several of the mines of knowledge with our pupils, that the first difficulties may be overcome by them whilst there is yet a power from without to aid their own faltering resolution, and that, so they may be enabled, if they will, to go on with the study hereafter."
Then all our American systems of education lay much stress on the practical and useful. Filled with an intense admiration for material success, many good and sober citizens will have it that no good can come out of the Nazareth of the classics. Mathematics are tolerated as in some vague way,