University methods of instruction have been introduced and laboratory work is made an important feature, to the exclusion of information courses, which should go toward making the student a well-informed man. Even the high schools have been infected, and in one city, at least, the lad of fourteen has the opportunity to elect a considerable part of his studies.
The whole system of groups or of wide election in the earlier years is based upon an erroneous conception of the proper aim of college work. No considerable proportion of American students are competent to decide at the outset of the college career or even at the close of the freshman year what studies they should pursue; nor in the vast majority of cases are the parents competent to decide the question. One is told that the German student is but nineteen years old when he enters the university, where all courses are open; and then is asked if he is prepared to assert that the American boy is less capable than the German boy. The question of capability or non-capability has nothing to do with the matter. When American secondary schools attain to the grade of the German gymnasium and American boys are compelled to undergo severe preparatory training such as is given in the gymnasium, they will be at least as competent to make a choice as are the German boys. But that matter is neither here nor there in this connection, for the training in our secondary schools is too frequently such as to cause only pain and annoyance to college instructors. The whole system is wrong, in view of the imperfect preliminary drill received by our students. No physical director would permit a hollow-chested, slender-armed sophomore to confine himself to leg exercises, merely because he has chosen book-canvassing as his life's work. Yet such freedom is allowed in the vastly more important matter of mental training; a sophomore who thinks he intends to become a clergyman is permitted to confine his attention to classics and literature; another, who finds mathematics distasteful and acquiring a vocabulary irksome, is permitted to select a course omitting those subjects, because he expects to be a lawyer; while another has the opportunity to select a still narrower course because he has medicine in view. So men pass through college, some to reach the ministry as 'leaders of thought' and at the same time to be laughing stocks for the children of the parish, because ignorant of the works of the God whom they preach; others to become lawyers and to find themslves shut out from the most important branches of practise, because ignorant of the fundamental principles of science; others still to become physicians and to find themselves handicapped in the race by inability to communicate their thoughts in direct language; while most of them enter life 's struggle with a stock of ignorance utterly discreditable to a young man of the twentieth century. The error throughout is due to forgetfulness of the fact that the college is a training not a professional school.
