368 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXIX. No. 740 



and chemistry has done for the intending 

 physician, and analogy would therefore 

 require that the business school become a 

 differentiated college type analogous to the 

 differentiated coUege types looking for- 

 ward to law and medicine. The catalogue 

 explains the graduate constitution of the 

 school on the grounds that students must 

 be mature and that the work is specialized 

 and technical. I confess that to me it ap- 

 pears neither more difficult nor more 

 Ihighly specialized than many of the courses 

 •provided for undergraduates. Harvard 

 "Opens to ordinary undergraduates courses 

 in statistics, the economics of transporta- 

 "tion, banking and exchange, labor prob- 

 lems, corporation economics, public finance, 

 taxation, railroad practise, principles of 

 accounting, principles of law governing in- 

 dustrial relations, not to mention others 

 like the theory of crises, to which under- 

 graduates may be admitted. Is it possible 

 -to make the slightest distinction on the 

 ■score of difficulty or technicality between 

 Ahe courses just mentioned as open to 

 lundergraduates and the following, consti- 

 TiUting the business courses, from which 

 th.ey are excluded: economic resources of 

 the United States, industrial organization, 

 banking, railroad operation, municipal 

 business 1 Neither in the necessary matur- 

 ity of the students nor in the special or 

 technical character of the topics is there 

 the least difference. The real considera- 

 tion lies here: the college is so disor- 

 ganized and usually so averse to definite 

 conception of function and to maintenance 

 of standards adequate to future use, that 

 whatever is serious, organized and de- 

 finitely purposeful tends to become post- 

 collegiate. Had the college been given to 

 organization and serious standards, the 

 graduate school of business would have 

 made an additional college type resting 

 upon the same general basis as the legal 

 and medical types; and the subjects com- 



posing it would be pursued and presented 

 in both their technical and their liberal 

 bearings. 



The proposed organization of the curric- 

 ulum on the basis of differentiated social 

 types differs essentially from the so-called 

 group system. The group system presents 

 combinations on departmental lines: Latin 

 and Greek, biolegy and chemistry, mathe- 

 matics and physics. The two subjects 

 forming a group belong, as a rule, closely 

 together, and they enter into combination 

 as linguistic or scientific entities detached as 

 far as may be from practical or social con- 

 cern — which detachment is, by the way, ac- 

 counted an advantage from the cultural 

 standpoint. The logical or departmental 

 integrity of the subject becsmes thus as 

 prominent in the college as in the graduate 

 school, where conditions and aims are so 

 very different. To my thinking, the col- 

 lege thus goes far towards defeating its 

 own cultural purpose. I do not pretend, 

 of course, that the culture value and the 

 scientific value of biology, for example, 

 are two separable elements; my meaning 

 will be clear from an educational point of 

 view when I say that the cultural im- 

 portance of biology to the college student 

 comes out when, in addition to his mastery 

 of biological science as such, its history, its 

 applications, its influence on the develop- 

 ment of thought, have been explicitly 

 brought forward; Avhen, in other words, 

 the vocational bearing and the social sig- 

 nificance of the vocation in question super- 

 vene upon the strictly scientific study. 

 Our present college methods of handling 

 science suffer not from too much, but from 

 too little vocational and professional in- 

 sight. Of course, the vocational handling 

 of biology may readily be just as narrow 

 as the scientific. But an intelligent treat- 

 ment, such as the college is the place and 

 has the time for, so far from confining the 

 student to mean ends, will open his eyes to 



