THE SOCIALIZATION OF THE COLLEGE 79 



sirable in the colleges of a democratic country and race ? The changed 

 conception of culture I have tried here to indicate as increasingly char- 

 acteristic of the academic mind must impress college students with the 

 reality, the robustness, of our ethical aims, and make of great educa- 

 tional value any instructor, no matter in what department, who holds 

 and embodies it. 



When young people leave college halls with dreams of the betterment 

 of the human race, they should in the first place make sure that they 

 do not prove a burden to their own families. An up-to-date, democratic 

 culture should not interfere with their earning their own living. In 

 fact, if properly educated, they will see in the choice of a calling a ques- 

 tion of the greatest moral moment. To fit oneself for a vocation, to 

 adapt oneself in a business way to society, is not hostile to true culture. 

 It is in recognizing the real bearings of our daily task, and taking satis- 

 faction in it that we grow into the only culture that seems worth while 

 to the adult mind. Is it too much to say that one of the dangers of our 

 age is the dilettante pursuit of scraps of the arts, and crumbs of the 

 foreign languages? In the years of maturity the cultivation of these 

 interests has something of the pathos of arrested development recurring 

 to the styles and ideals of the teens. 



The change in the attitude of professors and students towards the 

 needs of the people and the welfare and progress of society, so intimately 

 educational in its nature, seems to me the most promising factor in the 

 movement for college and university reform. As a professor of peda- 

 gogy I would here lay the chief emphasis ; but this change in the con- 

 ception of academic culture implies further changes to which I must 

 hasten. 



Space does not permit me to speak of all that American colleges are 

 doing, all that is still left them to do, in laying the cultural foundation, 

 as I understand the term, for the learned and other professions. If our 

 doctors were all true guardians of the public health, if all our engineers 

 were bent on furthering hygienic conditions, if all lawyers were zealous 

 in the cause of social justice, if all clergymen appreciated the larger 

 aspects of the people's needs, the cause of human welfare would be 

 secure. I must pause a moment, however, to say something concern- 

 ing the relation of the college to the schools. 



In the American college that I know most intimately about four 

 hundred students are received annually from the secondary schools and 

 other colleges. About one hundred and fifty are graduated every June. 

 Of the graduates, seventy or seventy-five return as teachers to the 

 schools. The secondary school affords the college, therefore, one of its 

 most important points of social contact. It is largely through the high 

 schools and academies, which in turn influence the grades, that the col- 

 lege makes its culture tell on the lives of the poor and common people, 



