OLD LAMPS FOR NEW 241 



men, artists, executives or business men, to whom the college offers four 

 years of broad cultural training, new points of view, and contact through 

 literature with the best of the world's thought. Such a student is pre- 

 pared by these four years for no special vocation, and perhaps not so 

 well for any vocation as if the training had been for some special end. 



The strong-minded and mature student appears the exception to this 

 statement, but in general will be found to be pursuing a self-imposed 

 curriculum with a definite vocation in mind. The prospective ministers, 

 lawyers, doctors and teachers were excluded from consideration because 

 their college course is not necessarily a broadly cultural one, but a 

 selected vocational training. For the same reason must the mature stu- 

 dent be excluded. A college instructor can separate his class into three 

 groups, those who set the pace, those who follow, and those who fall. Of 

 the first two groups some few are " grinds," some few " out for honors," 

 and the rest with rare exceptions interested vocationally in the subject- 

 matter. In every class prospective teachers help to set the pace; in 

 English courses, writers; in biological courses, doctors; in chemistry, 

 manufacturers. In other words, for the average students there is no 

 broad cultural college course, but rather many individual vocational 

 courses. 



The essential differences, however, between the vocational college 

 course and the technical-school course are both of degree and of kind. 

 The difference in degree is due largely to the existence on the one side of 

 a fixed required curriculum and on the other of a free or group elective 

 system. In a fixed engineering curriculum are many closely related 

 courses, those of one school year being immediately prerequisite to those 

 of the next year. In the better and larger technical schools a 

 failure in a prerequisite course, besides calling for a repetition of the 

 course, prevents the progress of a student with his class and delays 

 graduation one year. In arts colleges, under an elective system, the 

 severe penalty of a year's delay in graduation need only occur in case 

 the failure takes place in the last term of the senior year. Given stu- 

 dents working under these two systems, beneath equally eager and 

 requiring instructors, the pace of the average in the technical school 

 will exceed that of the average in the colleges. The result of this differ- 

 ence reacts upon the atmosphere of the institutions and leads to cumu- 

 lative effects. Thus in recent years athletics, as well as many other 

 school diversions, have steadily decreased in prominence in technical 

 schools and increased in colleges. This decrease in engineering schools 

 has resulted in more time and energy for study and admitted of a still 

 harder pace, while in arts colleges the increase has diverted the students' 

 energies and slowed the class room pace. 



A further difference in degree resulting from the close correlation of 

 courses mentioned above may best be shown by illustration. Mathe- 



VOL. LXXXI. — 17. 



