6o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



The traditions of scholarship attaching to the college are indeed 

 somewhat threadbare. From the monastery, by way of Oxford and 

 Cambridge, came the American college. So long as it was controlled 

 by the clergy for the education of the clergy and the church was a real 

 part of the life of the people, the college was vital, as are to-day the 

 schools of medicine, engineering and law. "When intending lawyers 

 and teachers — concerned like the clergymen with words, books and 

 traditions — became a large element among college students the schol- 

 astic curriculum was not inept. Six or eight years' study of the ele- 

 ments of the classical languages — scarcely ever reaching so far as 

 reading them with ease or writing them with correctness — did not 

 accomplish so very much in the way of broadening interests and en- 

 larging s}'mpathies, but it gave a good drill and a common stock of 

 knowledge and quotations, which made for the social homogeneity of a 

 class. Poetry and art have so completely based themselves on the 

 classical and biblical traditions that they are in danger of waning 

 together. 



Science has in the course of the past century caused a revolution in 

 human life. Its applications have made democracy and universal edu- 

 cation possible by enabling one man to do what formerly required ten. 

 Science has created new professions and has at the same time provided 

 the economic conditions which permit large numbers to follow them 

 and to undergo a long period of unproductive apprenticeship. The 

 same economic conditions have permitted the wealthy and potentially 

 idle classes to increase to a vast horde largely lacking the traditions of 

 an aristocracy. The lower death rate due to science is followed by a 

 lower birth rate. Women partly freed from manual work and child- 

 bearing can be idle, go to college or engage in sedentary occupations. 

 Then science has directly reformed our educational system by the new 

 material which it has supplied and by the new method which it has 

 made supreme. 



The English and American colleges have but partially and imper- 

 fectly adjusted themselves to this new life. The ghost of the obsoles- 

 cent scholastic system still hovers about the place; it is still haunted 

 by the phantom of the gentleman who hunts over his country estate 

 and drinks two bottles of wine for dinner, but whose son may become 

 a curate or the proconsul of an empire. Oxford and Cambridge have, 

 as a matter of fact, more nearly fitted themselves to the conditions of 

 British society than have our seaboard colleges to American democracy. 

 The B.A. may mean little more than a public-school education and 

 three six-months of residence at the university, but the young men have 

 on the whole a high sense of honor and duty, of traditions to be main- 

 tained. In addition to the poll men, there are honor courses at the 

 universities which are strictly special and professional — preparatory to 



