This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

because we don't know where we want to go. We don't know what we want.

"Just contrast," he continued, "the situation in the older English universities. Consider, for example, the Oxford don early in the nineteenth century. He knew what he was there for. He had in his mind's eye a perfectly definite type of English character. He knew that it was his business to produce a Christian, a scholar, and a gentleman. He had a perfectly clear notion of how this task was to be accomplished. He knew that all he had to do was to apply to the boy in his charge three great pressures: the pressure of the English church; the pressure of classical culture; and the pressure of a society of gentlemen. When John Henry Newman became a Roman Catholic and wrote his beautiful treatise on the education of Catholics, he employed, with one change, the same mold: he applied the pressure of classical culture, the pressure of a society of gentlemen, and the pressure of the Roman Catholic Church. The product, however dull he might be, was of a recognizably fine type: a Christian, a scholar, and a gentleman. No finished product has been made in modern times without the use of these three molds; and we Americans have discarded them one by one, most completely in the west, and in the typical educational institutions of the west, the State Universities.

"In the older institutions of America we tried to imitate and repeat the English process; and so long as we preserved some parts of the English mold