76 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



club or an athletic club, a place to know men, make 

 friends, improve one's too democratic manners, or even 

 to summarize it in terms of lofty ideals of character and 

 citizenship, is to continue to widen the gap between the 

 world of the students and the world of the intellectual 

 life. There is little doubt that we as instructors are re- 

 sponsible at times for a large part of the failure to get 

 over the idea that the college exists to give a ''fulness of 

 life", to promote the intellectual life. We cannot afford 

 to be pedants or give color to the comic papers' character- 

 ization of a college professor as a man devoid of hu- 

 man interests and lacking in that very "fulness of life" 

 which we accept as our goal. 



We deplore the lack of intellectual interests among un- 

 dergraduates, but seldom wonder over the commonplaces, 

 trivialities, uninspiring conversations, even cheap gossip 

 we sometimes hear when faculties foregather for lunch 

 or recreation. We can only recall the youthful eagerness 

 and idealism of students we know to wonder why they 

 should accept the spurious coinage of ''shop talk" or be 

 inspired by things that we are glad to lay aside as we do 

 our working clothes. Intellectual interests must be vital 

 or we have no right to ask youth to accept the disciplining 

 apprenticeship to achieve them. It is possible that we 

 have asked too much of them. 



The fact remains that our generation has been faced 

 with a problem of classifying students from kindergarten 

 through college, for a leadership that our grandfathers 

 did not dream of. We deal in numbers. We have many 

 neAv types, a greater diversity of interests and abilities 

 than in 1900. At no point in this process is the brilliant 

 child given a real chance, in a scientific sense, to achieve 

 leadership. Our curriculum in school and college is keyed 

 to the mediocre or democratic "average". The gifted 

 student is too frequently either not tried out or is al- 

 lowed to loaf through his training period and come out 

 without ability to use even his native resources. It is 

 hard to accept the principle growing out of the modern 

 science of individual differences: "Keep each student 

 at his highest level of achievement in order that he may 

 be successful, happy and good. ' ' 



