Mabch 5, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



363 



of connective mortar or controlling design 

 is the elective system ! 



The college development of the last 

 thirty years amounts, then, from our pres- 

 ent standpoint, to educational opportunity 

 rather than educational achievement. 

 Meanwhile the graduate school can not be 

 characterized in similarly negative terms. 

 Its activity in accumulating and refining 

 material represents positive achievement 

 of the highest order. But not college 

 achievement ; a serious pedagogical miscon- 

 ception is involved in embracing college 

 and graduate work in a single apprecia- 

 tion. Research is essentially a post-col- 

 legiate affair. Not, of course, the re- 

 search-spirit: that belongs to every stage 

 of modern education; it has its place in 

 the elementary school, in the secondary 

 school, in the college, in each of which the 

 pupil gets some of his motive power from 

 an active curiosity, a distinct tension or 

 problem-sense, far more efficacious in dis- 

 closing and disciplining power than a 

 didactic routine smacking strongly of au- 

 thority. When I urge that the coUege is 

 not the place for research, I do not say that 

 it is not the place for the research spirit; 

 I do not say that originality, initiative, 

 native reaction on the student's part, are 

 not to be sought after. What I mean is 

 that these essential qualities are not de- 

 veloped only in searching or researching 

 for new material; they are just as readily 

 evoked in situations that are old, provided 

 only the situations be real, pressing, vital 

 and in so far novel to the boy. Thus the 

 research spirit freely stimulated through 

 childhood and adolescence provides back- 

 ground and basis adequate both to suggest 

 and to support genuine problems. Lack- 

 ing this, problems are given to, not felt out 

 by, the student. This distinction can be 

 made with infinite advantage to both col- 

 lege and graduate school. Failure to per- 

 ceive it has led to the premature forcing of 



research and research workers upon the 

 college, as if only thus college studies could 

 be vitalized. Of course, if it is true that 

 research can alone keep teachers from out- 

 right ossification, haste must be made to 

 introduce it into the secondary and pri- 

 mary schools, where it is equally important 

 to have teachers who can bend without 

 breaking. The fact is, however, that some 

 men have totally dried up while research- 

 ing; that others keep their effervescent 

 sparkle without research by cultivating an 

 open and ready responsiveness to novelty, 

 regardless of whether it issue out of the 

 narrow limits of the university laboratory 

 or out of the great laboratory of human 

 life itself. It is absurd to ignore the 

 stimulus of modem life at large and to 

 emphasize exclusively the aspects of ac- 

 tivity represented by the academic work- 

 shop. All the live men are not laboratory 

 investigators; nor are all the investigators 

 keenly alive. Now then, research in the 

 eulogistic and narrow sense concerns itself 

 altogether with the employment by mature 

 intellects of a powerful technique for the 

 express purpose of increasing or refining 

 knowledge. For this sort of thing the 

 graduate school is the proper place; and 

 the graduate school in its brief history 

 has contributed substantially to increase 

 our intellectual store of precious metal. 



The college was enabled at a critical 

 juncture to import generously from the 

 newly established and highly productive 

 laboratories and libraries; but the very 

 bounteousness and suddenness of the en- 

 richment operated to hinder the growth of 

 definite conceptions of college function. 

 The lack of adjustment, which our topic 

 confesses, originates just here. The con- 

 cern of the college is with students, not 

 with stuff. Adjusting the college to life 

 means the pedagogic assimilation and or- 

 ganization of this accumulated and ac- 

 cumulating material; bringing it to bear 



