154 THE COLLEGE 



transitional, and that the key to reality is the whole person, all refute a purely 

 intellectual conception of education and logically require a broader view of 

 education than has anywhere commonly prevailed. 



And if as a Christian people, professing to find our highest ideals in the Christian 

 religion, we seek guidance from its goal that all men should live as obedient 

 sons of the heavenly Father and as brothers one of another we are face to face 

 again with that problem of the complex world of personal relations that cannot be 

 solved except through the training of the entire man. 



In all these lines of psychological, sociological, philosophical, and Christian 

 thinking our theories are right; our practice in education at best lags far behind. 

 Every line of modern thinking is a fresh insistence upon the concrete complexity 

 of life and upon the unity of man, and demands an education broad enough to 

 meet both. Nothing justifies the common extraordinary emphasis on the 

 intellectual as the one aim of education. 



It is not, then, by accident that we speak of the necessity of a liberal education. 

 For let us notice that even on the intellectual side the most valuable and vital 

 qualities cannot be given by rule or by any narrow technique. The supreme 

 demand is for what we call sanity, judgment, common sense, adaptability all 

 different names, perhaps, for the same thing, namely, ability to know whether 

 a given case is to be treated according to general precedent by appeal to a 

 general principle or decided upon its individual merits; to know whether our 

 problem is one of classification or one of more thorough acquaintance with the 

 particular. No rules or methods of procedure can make a reasoner or an investi- 

 gator; for the vital point is to pick out of a new situation, the exact element in it 

 which is significant for the purpose in hand. The case cannot have been anti- 

 cipated; the only help that education can give is through much practice in 

 discrimination and assimilation, and through the bestowal of a wide circle of 

 interests, esthetic and practical, even more than intellectual. Interpretative power 

 is similarly conditioned, and calls for the richest life in the interpreter. Even the 

 scientific spirit, then, the most valuable gift of a scientific training, is not 

 merely intellectual. Still less are the historical spirit and the philosophic spirit 

 intellectually conferred; they require at every turn the use of the key of the 

 whole man. 



And we certainly have a right to ask of education that it bring men to appre- 

 ciation of the great values of life what else does culture mean? to esthetic 

 taste and appreciation, to moral judgment and character, to the capacity for 

 friendship, to religious appreciation and response. 



But if we have a right to demand from an educational system in any measure 

 these qualities judgment, adaptability, discernment, interpretative power, the 

 scientific, historical, and philosophical spirit, and the culture adequate to enter 

 into the great spheres of value, esthetic, personal, moral, and religious, it is 

 evident that they can be given only indirectly and through the most liberal train- 

 ing. Do they not lie, in the nature of the case, quite beyond the limits of ele- 

 mentary, secondary, professional, or specialistic training, and constitute the great 

 aims of college education? Is there anything else likely to take the place of the 

 college in performing this greatest educational work? 



PRESIDENT MARY E. WOOLLEY, of Mt. Holyoke College, presented the follow- 

 ing paper on " The Place of the College in the Great Educational Movement " : 



THE form of the subject is itself significant, indicating the new conditions in 

 education. A twofold tendency of the age has invaded the educational world; 

 first, a movement toward the utilitarian, and second, that toward consolidation, 

 or what may be termed an " academic trust." It is perhaps not remarkable that 

 tendencies so characteristic of the century in its industrial and social life should 



