: The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on Education by Palmer Alice Freeman Palmer George Herbert - Education; Education Higher; Women Education

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, offer a certain number of elective studies, still show senior years largely occupied with elementary studies. Five forbid philosophy before the senior year; eight, political economy; two, history; six, geology. Out of the seven colleges which offer some one of the eastern languages, all except Harvard oblige the alphabet to be learned in the senior year. Of the six which offer Italian or Spanish, Harvard alone permits a beginning to be made before the junior year, while two take up these languages for the first time in the senior year. In three New England colleges German cannot be begun till the junior year. In a majority, a physical subject is begun in the junior and another in the senior year. At Yale nobody but a senior can study chemistry. Such postponement, and by consequence such fragmentary work, may be necessary where early college years are crowded with prescribed studies. But an elective system can employ its later years to better advantage. It can bring to a mature understanding the interests which freshmen and sophomores have already acquired. Elementary studies are not maturing studies; they do not make the fibre of a student firm. To studies of a solidifying sort the last years should be devoted. I should like to forbid seniors to take any elementary study whatever, and to forbid juniors all except philosophy, political economy, history, fine arts, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and law. Under such a rule we should graduate more men who would be first rate at something; and a man who is first rate at something is generally pretty good at anything.

Such, then, are a few examples of the ways in which choice may be limited so as to become strong. They are but examples, intended merely to draw attention to the three kinds of limitation still possible. Humble ways they may seem, not particularly interesting to hear about; business methods one might call them. But by means of these and such as these the young scholar becomes clearer in intention, larger in information, hardier in persistence. In urging such means I shall be seen to be no thick and thin advocate of election. That I have never been. Originally a doubter, I have come to regard the elective system, that is, election under such limitations as I have described, as the safest--indeed as the only possible--course which education can now take, I advocate it heartily as a system which need not carry us too fast or too far in any one direction, as a system so inherently flexible that its own great virtues readily unite with those of an alien type. Under its sheltering charge the worthier advantages of both grouped and prescribed systems are attainable. I proclaim it, therefore, not as a popular cry nor as an educational panacea, but as a sober opportunity for moral and intellectual training. Limited as it is at Harvard, I see that it works admirably with the studious, stimulatingly with those of weaker will, not unendurably with the depraved. These are great results. They cannot be set aside by calling them the outcome of "individualism." In a certain sense they are. But "individualism" is an uncertain term. In every one of us there is a contemptible individuality, grounded in what is ephemeral and capriciously personal. Systematic election, as I have shown, puts limitations on this. But there is a noble individuality which should be the object of our fostering care. Nothing that lends it strength and fineness can be counted trivial. To form a true individuality is, indeed, the ideal of the elective system. Let me briefly sketch my conception of that ideal.

George Herbert, praising God for the physical world which He has made, says that in it "all things have their will, yet none but thine." Such a free harmony between thinking man and a Lord of his thought it is the office of education to bring about. At the start it does not exist. The child is aware of his own will, and he is aware of little else. He imagines that one pleasing fancy may be willed as easily as another. As he matures, he discovers that his will is effective when it accords with the make of the world and ineffective when it does not. This discovery, bringing as it does increased respect for the make of the world and even for its Maker, degrades or ennobles according as the facts of the world are now viewed as restrictive finalities or as an apparatus for larger self-expression. Seeing the power of that which is not himself, a man may become passively receptive, and say, "Then I am to have no will of my own"; or he may become newly energetic, knowing that though he can have no will of his separate own, yet all the power of God is his if he will but understand. A man of the latter sort is spiritually educated. Much still remains to be done in understanding special laws; and with each fresh understanding, a fresh possibility of individual life is disclosed. The worth, however, of the whole process lies in the man's honoring his own will, but honoring it only as it grows strong through accordance with the will of God.

Now into our colleges comes a mixed multitude made up of all the three classes named: the childish, who imagine they can will anything; the docile, so passive in the presence of an ordered world that they have little individual will left; the spiritually-minded or original, who with strong interests of their own seek to develop these through living contact with truths which they have not made. Our educational modes must meet them all, respecting their wills wherever wise, and teaching the feeble to discriminate fanciful from righteous desires. For carrying forward such a training the elective system seems to me to have peculiar aptitudes. What I have called its limitations will be seen to be spiritual assistances. To the further invention of such there is no end. A watchful patience is the one great requisite, patience in directors, instructed criticism on the part of the public, and a brave expression of confidence when confidence is seen to have been earned.

FOOTNOTES:

As the minute personal care given to individual students in the English universities is often and deservedly praised, I may as well say that it costs something. Oxford spends each year about ,000,000 on 2500 men; Harvard, 0,000 on 1700.

I may not have a better opportunity than this to clear up a petty difficulty which seems to agitate some of my critics. They say they want the degree of A.B. to mean something definite, while at present, under the elective system, it means one thing for John Doe, and something altogether different for his classmate, Richard Roe. That is true. Besides embodying the general signification that the bearer has been working four years in a way to satisfy college guardians, the stately letters do take on an individual variation of meaning for every man who wins them. They must do so as long as we are engaged in the formation of living persons. If the college were a factory, our case would be different. We might then offer a label which would keep its identity of meaning for all the articles turned out. Wherever education has been a living thing, the single degree has always contained this element of variety. The German degree is as diverse in meaning as ours. The degree of the English university is diverse, and more diverse for Honors men--the only ones who can properly be said to deserve it--than for inert Pass men. Degrees in this country have, from the first, had considerable diversity, college differing from college in requirement, and certainly student from student in attainment. That twenty-five years ago we were approaching too great uniformity in the signification of degrees, I suppose most educators now admit. That was a mechanical and stagnant period, and men have brought over from it to the more active days of the present ideals formed then. Precision of statement goes with figures, with etiquette, with military matters; but descriptions of the quality of persons must be stated in the round.

COLLEGE EXPENSES

The subject of college expenses has been much debated lately. At our Commencement dinner, a year ago, attention was called to it. Our chairman on that occasion justly insisted that the ideal of the University should be plain living and high thinking. And certainly there is apt to be something vulgar, as well as vicious, in the man of books who turns away from winning intellectual wealth and indulges in tawdry extravagance. Yet every friend of Harvard is obliged to acknowledge with shame that the loose spender has a lodging in our yard. No clear-sighted observer can draw near and not perceive that in all his native hideousness the man of the club and the dog-cart is among us.

I do not think this strange. In fact, I regard it as inevitable. It is necessarily connected with our growth. The old College we might compare, for moral and intellectual range, with a country village; our present University is a great city, and we must accept the many-sided life, the temptations as well as the opportunities, of the great city. Probably nowhere on this planet can a thousand young men be found, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, who will not show examples of the heedless, the temptable, and the depraved. Let us not, then, shrink from acknowledging the ugly fact; extravagance is here,--shameless, coarse extravagance. I hope nothing I say may diminish our sense of its indecency. But how widespread is it? We must not lose sight of that important question. How largely does it infect the College? Are many students large spenders? Must a man of moderate means on coming here be put to shame? Will he find himself a disparaged person, out of accord with the spirit of the place, and unable to obtain its characteristic advantages? These are the weighty questions. Only after we have answered them can we determine the moral soundness of the University. Wherever we go on earth we shall find the insolently rich and wasteful. They, like the poor, are always with us; their qualities are cheap. But what we want to know is whether, side by side with them, we have a company of sober men, who care for higher things and who spend no more than the higher things require. Facts of proportion and degree form the firm basis of general judgments, and yet I am aware that these are the hardest facts to obtain. Hitherto nobody has known any such facts in regard to the expenses of Harvard. Assertions about the style of living here have only expressed the personal opinion of the assertor, or at best have been generalizations from a few chance cases. No systematic evidence on the subject has existed. It is time it did exist, and I have made an attempt to obtain it. To each member of the graduating class I sent a circular, a month ago, asking if he would be willing to tell me in confidence what his college course had cost. I desired him to include in his report all expenses whatever. He was to state not merely his tuition, board, and lodging, but also his furniture, books, clothing, travel, subscriptions, and amusements; in fact, every dollar he had spent during the four years of his study, except his charges for Class Day and the summer vacations; these times varying so widely, it seemed to me, in their cost to different men that they could not instructively enter into an average.

The reply has been very large indeed. To my surprise, out of a class of two hundred and thirty-five men actually in residence, two hundred and nineteen, or ninety-three per cent, have sent reports. Am I wrong in supposing that this very general "readiness to tell" is itself a sign of upright conduct? But I would not exaggerate the worth of the returns. They cannot be trusted to a figure. It has not been possible to obtain itemized statements. College boys, like other people, do not always keep accounts. But I requested my correspondents, in cases of uncertainty, always to name the larger figure; and though those who have lived freely probably have less knowledge about what they have spent than have their economical classmates, I think we may accept their reports in the rough. We can be reasonably sure whether they have exceeded or fallen below a certain medium line, and for purposes more precise I shall not attempt to use them. Anything like minute accuracy I wish expressly to repudiate. The evidence I offer only claims to be the best that exists at present; and I must say that the astonishing frankness and fulness of the reports give me strong personal assurance of the good faith of the writers. In these letters I have seen a vivid picture of the struggles, the hopes, the errors, and the repentings of the manly young lives that surround me.

What, then, are the results? Out of the two hundred and nineteen men who have replied, fifty-six, or about one quarter of the class, have spent between 0 and 0 in each of the four years of residence; fifty-four, or again about a quarter, have spent between 0 and 5; but sixty-one, hardly more than a quarter, have spent a larger sum than 00. The smallest amount in any one year was 0; the largest, 00.

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