Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/174

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still, as of old, is, "to put the young man between eighteen and twenty-two into possession of his intellectual heritage, to hand on to him the wealth of emotion and experience which the race has accumulated." We may therefore now amicably divide the educational world—I give the gist of his conclusions in my own words. Since a complex of forces, largely economic, has inevitably locked the State university and the high school in one system, and the endowed college and the expensive preparatory school in another, the Western university will look after the body and the eastern college will look after the soul. And we are sure that this arrangement ought to be agreeable to all parties concerned.

Such a partition of functions, however, the western State university can ill afford to regard with complacency. For what would the permanent acceptance of the intellectual hegemony of the eastern colleges involve and what would it signify? It would involve either sacrificing whatever youths of high intellectual promise the West could produce to its soulless vocational system, or else sending them eastward at the age of fourteen, for school and college, with the probability that they would lose contact and sympathy with their early surroundings,