OLD LAMPS FOR NEW 243 



truth." A truth of fact or method may be expressed in recitation and 

 examination, but its impression frequently will not endure to gradua- 

 tion unless it has been reenforced by use in later and more advanced 

 analysis. 



The difference in kind between the vocational-college course and the 

 technical course is esthetically in favor of the college. What is " shop " 

 to the writer or artist is culture to the general, but what is shop to the 

 engineer is shop to every one. Those subjects of a college curriculum 

 which, unlike the sciences, are not shop, are to be classed popularly as 

 either pedantic or cultural. The economic group is an illustration of 

 the first division, the language and literature group of the other. The 

 technical-school graduate, as has been noted, is sadly deficient in both 

 divisions. The arts-college man pursuing his individual vocational 

 course may be practically as deficient as the graduates of the better tech- 

 nical institutions. In general, however, he is not. 



Some possible difficulties in the way of the Amherst scheme have 

 been indicated by this analysis. To those students, whose individual 

 vocational courses do not include the sciences, the Amherst curriculum 

 will be essentially that of other colleges of the same rank. The attempt 

 to supply a general broad culture and training for those students who 

 have no definite objective, but are potentially future statesmen and 

 administrators, seems to promise nothing more than do Harvard, 

 Williams or Yale. Except for the students in vocational courses, how- 

 ever, the pacemakers will be gone. It is hard, as has been noted, to say 

 of any day's class assignment of history, philosophy or language, that it 

 is likely to be of service in later life. For the engineering, law or med- 

 ical student, a statement of the probable usefulness of each particular 

 lesson can be made with more certitude and definiteness ; for other voca- 

 tional students with less, but for the student of general culture, with a 

 minimum. The question then is whether, in the distraction of interests, 

 without a single and definite goal, lacking the disciplinary sciences, 

 when of no single day's lesson it can be said that it is immediately pre- 

 requisite to the student's life work, the class-room standards will not 

 suffer. 



To place the emphasis upon the " humanities " is retrogressive if 

 the term is defined in its limited, derived and Scottish meaning of 

 " polite and classical literature." Let the term be defined by a less 

 derived meaning of " liberal knowledge befitting man " and it may be 

 postulated that college and technical school alike should train their 

 students in the humanities. This liberal knowledge should fit a young 

 man for service to society and for sympathetic and congenial relation- 

 ships with his fellow man. It must include not only the history and 

 economics and the cultural arts and literature in which the present tech- 

 nical course is deficient, but also the science in which too often the arts 



