i 7 8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



such union while circumstances require it. Our universities are 

 of later growth, and are with scarcely an exception in this tran- 

 sition period, with large undergraduate classes. With these, as 

 with the colleges, we have no controversy, for they are doing ex- 

 cellent work, and their circumstances in these earlier stages seem 

 to require this union, which, under other circumstances, we should 

 earnestly deprecate. 



We say they are doing excellent work, but this is because of 

 the completeness of their organization in other respects and the 

 able faculties which they employ. But surely they could do 

 worthier work were these faculties free to give their time and 

 attention to graduate students, and no longer hampered and hin- 

 dered by the instruction of large classes of undergraduates. And 

 the present condition of things is equally a disadvantage to our 

 colleges, whose students, to rival those of universities, aspire to 

 what is quite beyond undergraduate work, and thus wholly over- 

 look the plain line of distinction between a college and a univer- 

 sity, consisting as it does so largely of the separating line between 

 acquisition of the known and investigation of the unknown. And 

 hence it is, too, that a number of colleges, even those of low grade, 

 and especially those of low grade, aspire to be called universities. 

 The changes proposed will do away with all this, and colleges and 

 universities will each do better work in their respective fields. 



We shall then hail with joy, as advancing the best interests of 

 education in this country, the time when all our universities 

 shall have reached the stage of admitting to their courses no 

 undergraduate students. 



It will be seen that to adopt the outline here presented to our 

 educational system it will be needful, in the four grammar-school 

 years (high schools and academies being left out of the scheme), to 

 prepare students properly for entering upon one of the courses in 

 college, the ancient or the modern letters course, or the science 

 course, the requirements for the admission to each being now rap- 

 idly equalized by our best colleges. With the nine years of most 

 thorough training in the three earlier grades, from the age of three 

 to twelve, and under teachers who are themselves no mere experi- 

 menters, but thoroughly trained to their work, this will be found 

 quite possible, and the preparation will be even better made than 

 under our present system. Of course, the plan involves a com- 

 plete training in all the grades, including a professional train- 

 ing for teaching in the university before entering upon the 

 responsible position of teacher of the young in any one of the 

 grades, even of the lowest. When this time arrives, teaching as a 

 means of eking out a scanty subsistence, or as a stepping-stone to 

 something higher, with wholly inadequate professional prepara- 

 tion, will be done away. It is, indeed, an expensive method of 



