Should Students Study? - William Trufant Foster

Скачать книгу

      And so the undergraduate stretches his legs before the hearth and hears the wisdom of the "Old Grad." In his day, it seems, things were different. The students were not such mollycoddles, the beer flowed more freely, and the faculty did not try to run things. No, sir, in the good old days the faculty did not spoil College Life. What a glorious celebration after that 56 to 0 game, when every window in old West Hall was broken and the stoves were thrown down-stairs!

      "I tell you, boys," cried the "Old Grad," warming his feet by the fire and his imagination by the wonder of the freshmen, "it is not what you learn in your classes that counts. It is the College Life. Books, lectures, recitations—you will forget all that. Nobody cares after you graduate whether you know any Latin or algebra, unless you are a teacher, and no man can afford to be a teacher nowadays. But you will remember the College Life as long as you live."

      Some of the alumni would have a different story to tell, no doubt, but they do not get back often for fraternity initiations. Perhaps they are too busy. And again, they may have nothing but "grinds" during their college days.

       The Respectable Grade of Mediocrity

      Whatever we may think of the "Old Grad's" remarks, the idea does prevail in many a college that the most important enterprises are found in the side-shows, conducted by the students themselves, while the faculty present more or less buncombe performances in the main tent. Woodrow Wilson said something to this effect before he gave up trying to make boys take their studies seriously in favor of an easier job. Dean Fine said to the alumni of Princeton University: "The typical boy entering a college like Princeton in these days is much more vitally interested in other boys and in sports than in books. To him the lure of college is not in its studies, but in its life." Professor Churchman of Clark College regards success in athletics and the social life of the college as "the honest ambition of an appalling proportion of fathers and mothers who are sending their sons to fashionable colleges, in the same spirit that accompanies their daughters to fashionable finishing-schools." One father, whose son triumphed on the gridiron and failed in his studies, said to the dean of Harvard College, "My son's life has been just what I wanted it to be."

      In 1903 a committee of the Harvard faculty, after extensive investigation, found that the average amount of study was "discreditably small." The committee declared that there was "too much teaching and not enough study," and that ambitious students find little incentive to take honors. The following year another committee reported that the student body did not regard grades in college courses as any test of ability. In 1908 still another committee came to this conclusion: "Contentment with mediocrity is perhaps the greatest danger that faces us, and it is closely connected with the feeling among students that college is a sort of interlude in serious life, separated from what goes before and dissociated from what follows." A large majority of seniors at Harvard expressed this belief in response to a questionnaire, and students elsewhere have expressed the conviction in a score of ways.

      Many students look upon scholarship as a menial servant in the household of College Life, tolerated for a time in order that the abode may be free to welcome its convivial guests. They regard the social light of the fraternity and the hero of the gridiron as the most promising candidates for success in life. The valedictorian appears to them too confined in his interests to meet successfully anything beyond the artificial needs of the class-room. He—poor fellow!—is supposed to be doomed to failure in real life. Wherefore the respectability of "The Gentleman's Grade"-the sign of mediocrity in scholarship. Wherefore the epithet "grind," with its superlative "greasy grind," which sums up the contempt of the "good fellow" for the man who makes hard study his chief collegiate interest.

      In many a student group the boy thus speeds up and passes his fellows is treated as a "scab." And in many a faculty group the idea seems to be:

      'Tis better to have come and loafed.

      Than never to have come at all.

      Such ideas find fertile ground in high schools, and the seed spreads even to the virgin soil of kindergarten. The new tree of life-the painless education, by the do-what-you-please, when-you-please, how-you-please method—is said to have been imported from Italy. It may have acquired only its label abroad, after the fashion of imported wines. Certainly its foliage is much like our native stock of the American college variety.

      Even when upon the correspondence schools are grafted some branches of the tree of College Life. If it said that a father in Hood River, Oregon, found his son standing on his head in the crotch of an apple-tree, waving his legs in the air and giving a college yell.

      "Come down, boy," he cried. "Are you crazy?"

      "No, father; leave me alone," said he. "I have just started my correspondence-school course, and the sophomores have written me to go and haze myself."

      Chapter II. Differences—East and West

       Table of Contents

      There are differences among the colleges, to be sure. let us admit that before we go further, so that any one may feel free to make such exceptions as his knowledge or his loyalty seems to warrant. The idea that College Life in "caps" should be the text, with studies as a foot-note, has not gripped all institutions with the same force. In some the idea seems to be a settled conviction; in others, little more than a suspicion.

      I have visited a hundred or more colleges, from the University of Maine in the Northeast to the University of Redlands in the Southwest. I have learned what I would from the oldest university at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and from the youngest at Houston, Texas. Along twenty-five thousand miles of travel, I have tried to determine, from what students say and do, to what extent they deem study worth the effort. Their estimates vary.

      Colleges cannot be readily classified on the basis of earnestness of purpose with which the students greet the curriculum. It does not appear that State universities stand higher or lower in this regard that privately supported institutions. Nor are there class distinctions of this kind between small and large colleges, between sectarian and non-sectarian colleges, or even between universities with millions of endowment and those endowed with poverty and hopes. There appears to be a difference between schools of the East and schools of the West; but other generalizations, though frequently made by overzealous friends of particular schools, appear to be based on too few cases.

      I am speaking, always, of the central tendencies of groups—of the mode, as sociologists would say, and not of the few extreme cases in the surface of distribution. Nearly every college has its distinctive feature, which balks classification. One might conclude, from the studiousness of the boys at the College of the City of New York, that large, free, urban universities are the usual resorts of serious-minded youth. Such a conclusion would ignore the racial factor, more important in this instance than any other. The intellectual achievements of older graduates of Williams and Bowdoin and Amherst appear to make out a strong case for the small, sectarian, New England country college. But a generation or two ago there were no large, free, urban institutions. Evidence is not available sufficient to prove that the recent graduates of the small country colleges have finer intellectual enthusiasms than the recent graduates of any other group of colleges. Conclusions based on the spirit of a generation ago are usually misleading as present-day guides. Such conclusions may or may not be misleading in this case. American colleges changed vitally during the past generation, and a few are changing rapidly to-day.

      With these qualifications I venture one generalization: students of the younger Western colleges are more worthy of the name than those of the older Eastern colleges. They come through greater sacrifices and with more serious purposes. This is what history tells us to expect of the frontier. It is, moreover, the usual report of those who have taught in the East and in the West. Eagerness for knowledge is one manifestation of the enthusiasm of youth in a young country. In many of the older seats of learning, responsiveness to the efforts of instructors is in bad form. To do more than the assigned lesson, or to tarry after the lecture for more help, is to risk one's reputation. "Harvard indifference" is not Harvard indifference; it is the attitude toward studies of young men anywhere

Скачать книгу