490 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



mental conception of what all of these educational institutions are 

 striving for. Unless we agreed about that we could not possibly agree 

 as to their efficiency. Fortunately, there is general agreement to-day 

 that the aim of all educational institutions is a social one. The 

 University of Kansas, and Boston Tech and Columbia University and 

 all the rest are striving to this great end — to train men to serve the 

 state intelligently, honestly and effectively. We are all attempting 

 that. To what extent do we succeed relatively to one another ? 



Now, the natural process, I say, would be to examine the product 

 of these different institutions and see whether men coming from these 

 different institutions have " made good." This, however, is no easy 

 matter where there are thousands of men to be considered and the 

 gauging of the social efficiency of a single man is so difficult and deli- 

 cate an operation. And then, you have to remember that the " making 

 good " by an individual may have really little to do with the educational 

 institution in which he has been trained. I had the honor of being 

 brought up in the English university of Cambridge, which has been 

 spoken of by a poet as a " nest of singing birds," for the reason that 

 that university has produced, if I may use the term, an extraordinarily 

 large number of great poets. But no one seriously suggests that the 

 poetic power of Tennyson or Wordsworth had much to do with his 

 training in the University of Cambridge. And so it is with the actual 

 making good of a great many of our leading men; in most cases it is 

 only indirectly due to the training they received in the university. 

 Then you must bear in mind that an extremely important factor in 

 the making of good flour is to have good grain, and that one institution 

 might be as efficient as another, but yet for the lack of good grain not 

 turn out so fine a product. Thus you would have to gauge not only 

 the graduate, but the men at entrance, and this would greatly com- 

 plicate the problem. Practically, then, I think, you would have to 

 proceed indirectly by carefully examining the means that were employed 

 in the institution to produce the results. If you bore in mind the 

 idea of social service as a thing toward which we are all striving, you 

 would have to begin, I suppose, with some estimate of the relative social 

 value of a college education and the education in a professional school, 

 taking each at its best. The aim of a college is to train a man broadly 

 and so develop every side of his charcter that he can devote himself to 

 the duties of citizenship in whatever special sphere of activity he can 

 be most effective. The professional school does not neglect breadth 

 of outlook or the duties of citizenship, but it bends its powers to the 

 education of men for the service of society through the medium of 

 definite professions. To gauge the relative value of these two schools 

 you would need to decide whether it was more important to have an 

 alert broad-minded man with no professional skill, or a man who could 



