580 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



faculty, in the supposition that he should have enough judgment to sift 

 out those who are not likely to profit by his work, and consequently 

 should have the power to exclude them from his classes. If such a de- 

 mand upon him were to compel a more direct personal relationship with 

 his students, that would not be an unmixed evil. As a matter of fact, 

 the trouble does not lie so much in the inherent difficulty of the task as 

 in its lack of harmony with academic precedent. Our system rather 

 presupposes that since past attainment is the claim to recognition, when 

 once a man has got inside he has a prescriptive title to remain, unless 

 some extraordinary reason forces his expulsion. 



It might very well be that such a system would modify to an extent 

 also the place of the degree in education. But the sacredness of the 

 degree is in any case open to question. It is now a title to intellectual 

 respectability of the peculiarly unfortunate sort which combines with a 

 claim to superiority, denied to its non-possessor, a thinly veiled recogni- 

 tion by the informed that its real content is merely nominal, and that 

 it can be counted on to stand for little more than the fact that its 

 holder has passed four years at a given locality, with enough attention 

 to his books in the intervals of more important occupations to prevent 

 naturally lenient instructors from condemning him as beyond question 

 unfit. The justification of the degree is solely the aid it renders in the 

 desperate enterprise of inducing in the general mind a sense that 

 scholarship has its points; it marks therefore a failure of more funda- 

 mental motives, and its claims can not be pressed too hard until other 

 efforts have been exhausted. Probably it will have to be retained 

 along with other relics of medievalism, though there is no reason why 

 at the same time there should not exist a large increase of students 

 without full technical preparation, or the ability to pursue their aca- 

 demic work at length, who will cease to be regarded as so much dead 

 weight, and be recognized as having human if not scholastic claims. 

 And at least if the degree is to hold its place, this apparently can only 

 be on condition of the already strong tendency to make its meaning 

 exceedingly elastic. The endeavor to keep the degree true to what 

 traditionally has constituted the education of a gentleman, disguised 

 under the name of liberal, is really the attempt to keep up the fiction 

 of a learned class marked off by formal insignia, under the pretence 

 that there is only one royal road to culture. 



And if now we turn in conclusion to the second aspect of the social 

 purpose of education — the equipping of the narrower class of intellec- 

 tual leaders on whom will always depend the initiation and the steer- 

 ing of social progress, I venture to think that this is a much less im- 

 portant problem than the former one, for the simple reason that here 

 the root of the matter lies in large measure beyond the province of edu- 

 cational machinery in the lap of nature. The exceptional man is pretty 



