EVOLUTION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM. 245 



a student of English in an American college. To 

 him the free air of the American school was its 

 one good thing. It develops a self-reliant man- 

 hood in the youth at an age at which the student 

 of the gymnasium is yet in leading strings. In 

 furnishing the best of mental training in certain 

 fixed and narrow lines, the German student is 

 deprived of that strength which comes from self- 

 help and individual responsibility. It is no mere 

 accident that the need of severe college discipline 

 to guard against the various forms of traditional 

 college mischief has steadily declined with the 

 advent of freedom of choice in study. 



The elective system, too, enables the student to 

 bring himself into contact with the best teachers, — 

 a matter vastly more important than that he should 

 select the best studies. And this system, there- 

 fore, involves a not unhealthy competition among 

 the instructors themselves. Incompetent, super- 

 ficial, or fossilized men will be crowded out or 

 frozen out, and the law of the survival of the fittest 

 will rule in the college faculties as elsewhere in 

 Nature. 



The elective system has been adopted in greater 

 or less degree by most of our leading colleges; 

 while there are now very few schools, large or 

 small, which do not make some provision for 

 elective studies. That some degree of freedom 

 of choice in higher education is desirable, no one 

 now questions. The main differences of opinion 

 relate to the proportion which these elective stud- 

 ies ought to bear to those which are absolutely 

 required, and to the age or degree of advance- 



