EVOLUTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM. 24 1 



all, and select that which he liked best as the future 

 work of his life. Thoroughness is for men, not 

 boys, and it is a part of life-work rather than of 

 school discipline. But every influence of the col- 

 lege was away from this end. The value of per- 

 sistent study, as the Germans know it, was never 

 made known to the student. His professors were 

 not specialists. They knew nothing from first- 

 hand, and they undervalued in all ways the power 

 which comes from knowing what one knows. So 

 they taught only definitions and classifications and 

 names and dates and scrap-work generally. There 

 was little temptation to study; for the business of 

 the professor was repetition, not investigation. It 

 was in reference to such work as this that Agassiz 

 said of Harvard College, some twenty years ago, 

 that it was no university, — ** only a respectable 

 high-school, where they taught the dregs of learn- 

 ing." A candidate for a chair in an Illinois college 

 demanded of the Board of Trustees that he must 

 be allowed some time for study. He was not 

 elected; for the Board said that they wanted no 

 man who had to study his lessons. They wanted 

 a professor who knew already all that he had to 

 teach. Men of second-hand scholarship are, of 

 necessity, men of low ideals, however carefully 

 this fact may be disguised ; a man of high ideals 

 of scholarship must be an investigator. He must 

 know and think for himself; and only such as do 

 this can be really great as teachers. 



One vice of this system is its constant implica- 

 tion that when after a few weeks a study is dropped, 

 it is thereby completed, — as though any subject 



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