152 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



as an end of education something just as fundamental as lies in the 

 meat and kernel of these old shibboleths and at the same time more 

 specifically and functionally related to modern social life and needs as 

 they actually are. We need the classic virtues the moralists of all times 

 have loved to dwell upon, but we need much more. We need the trained 

 capacity, the knowledge and perspective, to turn these virtues to social 

 account, to leaven them with a social consciousness, to render them 

 effective by social insight. Goodness does not suffice. We demand effi- 

 ciency. Meaning well is not enough. We know that hell is paved with 

 good intentions, and that too often they are put to that uneconomical 

 use through lack of knowledge of this poor earthly earth. We demand, 

 therefore, significant knowledge — we will not tolerate the ignorance of 

 prudery or the mere pride of erudition. Both these have been baneful 

 influences in the college world. Ignorance we shall have to hold to be 

 positively immoral, socially unproductive, and sometimes actually 

 criminal. We are going to insist upon the productive life. We want 

 moral valuations as well as economic valuations to be sound, and we 

 are on the verge of discovering that we can not have one without the 

 other. We want institutions, beliefs, social processes to stand on their 

 own merit. Unswerving loyalty to authority no longer suffices. We 

 demand rational, responsible, thought-out action. 



But the small college, slow to catch the new spirit, or to sense the 

 moral growth of the times, sticks to " character " as the ultima thule 

 of education. Tucked away in some secluded and protected nook of 

 geographical isolation, sequestered in pleasant preserves of philosophical 

 individualism and theological conservatism, many a small college has 

 felt, until comparatively recently, only the eddies of the great stream 

 of social and intellectual unrest. While the world is painfully going 

 through the throes of the birth of a new Zeitgeist, college faculties have 

 been content, not uncommonly, to drone away on philosophies of for- 

 gotten epochs — afraid, apparently, to venture into the present lest it 

 make dangerous demands upon old faiths — faiths educational and ec- 

 clesiastical, faiths economic and moral — faiths tried and true in great 

 measure, and in their essence capable of meeting any critical test, but 

 not as yet fully subjected to such a trying and purging fire as twentieth- 

 century rationalism and scientific opportunism seem to some timid 

 souls bound to prove. More than this, to pioneer an institution or a 

 constituency into the undiscovered future means work, calls for excep- 

 tional foresight and circumspection, vigor of purpose, openness of mind, 

 and strength to drag along those who, through fear or inertia, lag be- 

 hind. To think along new lines, to cast overboard old habits of thought, 

 to acquire new viewpoints, is a painful process; ho mind likes to be 

 remade; few have the power to keep themselves continuously in repair 

 and in tune with the times. Yet these are the capacities essential to 

 college presidents and to college teachers. 



