406 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXIX. No. 741 



by union with such teachers can we keep 

 the college near to life. 



As to our present condition, in the 

 American college of to-day, I agree with 

 our critics that many college boys do not 

 now work hard enough. The remedy lies, 

 of course, in giving such boys more good 

 work to do, and in employing more instruc- 

 tors whose duty it should be to follow 

 them up personally in their work. The 

 remedy also lies in increasing the effective- 

 ness of our systems of individual advice — 

 in brief in individualizing our methods of 

 dealing with the individual. The remedy 

 does not lie in banishing the work of the 

 investigators to separate institutions, nor 

 in differentiating a colony of pedagogical 

 neuters, who can not generate ideas, nor 

 add to knowledge, but who, as one 

 imagines, can therefore the better teach. 

 "We have enough of the barren and unpro- 

 ductive minds at present amongst our col- 

 lege teachers. We want more living and 

 growing investigators than we have. And 

 we want our productive investigators to do 

 more undergraduate teaching than they 

 do. There is a place in the college, of 

 course, for the great teacher who can im- 

 part knowledge, but who can not add to it, 

 if indeed his is not really an unproductive 

 mind, but a mind that, like that of Soc- 

 rates, the prince of teachers, produces in- 

 directly, by acting as the midwife, and by 

 delivering others of the ideas with which 

 their own minds are pregnant. But every 

 effort to separate even this singularly val- 

 uable class of teachers from their investi- 

 gating and originating colleagues, or to 

 keep the investigators as a class by them- 

 selves, in institutions to be called univer- 

 sities, and to be sundered from our present 

 colleges— every such effort, I say, seems to 

 me to be in the direction of regression, of 

 pedantry, and if I may speak frankly, of 

 obscurantism. We want teaching and in- 

 vestigation to become more and more what 



they .ought to be— one and inseparable 

 Some investigators indeed can wisely teach 

 only advanced pupils. Let them confine 

 themselves to such work. Some good college 

 teachers add nothing notable to knowledge. 

 We welcome them whenever they do 

 sufficiently good work of their own kind to 

 make them valuable for the college. Some 

 professional training, by reason of its 

 topic or of its grade, must keep itself well 

 apart from more elementary instruction; 

 let it then do so. But let us not be so 

 terrified by mere names and definitions 

 that we shall set off by itself, in unprofit- 

 able isolation from the college, that sort 

 and grade of professional instruction 

 which can also help to awaken and to dis- 

 cipline youth at the collegiate age. And 

 above all let us not be so much the slaves 

 of the mere name college as to undertake 

 to draw a sharp line which, in modern life, 

 has no longer a place— a sharp line be- 

 tween all sorts of undergraduate and all 

 sorts of graduate instruction. Many of 

 our graduates need cultivation, badly 

 enough, as all of us know. Many of our 

 undergraduates need pretty advanced 

 studies to wake them up. Let such have 

 them. 



As for the unquestionable present evils 

 of too little hard work and too much 

 sport on the part of the college undergrad- 

 uates of to-day, let us meet these evils in 

 two ways: 



1. In general, let us seek to assimilate 

 college work more rather than less to that 

 sort and grade of professional work which 

 calls out a young man's energies just be- 

 cause he feels that in such work something 

 is at stake that is, for him, personally mo- 

 mentous. 



2. In detail, let us make the college boy 

 work harder by giving him more work to 

 do, by following him up more closely and 

 individually, and to that end, let us em- 

 ploy more teachers whose work of instrue- 



