54 
JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY 
[Vol. 13 
The teacher is a good deal like a gardener. There are plants of 
various characteristics filling the garden. Individually, they are what 
they are, so far as species is concerned. The gardener cannot change 
that. He cannot bring them plant food to be injected into them and 
thereby change their makeup. But he can shape their growth and can 
profoundly influence their final form and utility. In accomplishing 
this he must hoe and rake and lug water. If he thinks of these tasks 
as sheer, purposeless routine, his garden will suffer and he, himself, will 
lead a dreary existence. If he considers his plants as living things, 
whose possibilities he will deeply influence, his daily task is illumined 
and refreshed. 
Why are students taking the courses that we offer in college? What 
are the purposes of college training? It may not be amiss to con¬ 
sider them, for they are not always clear in the dim light that some¬ 
times pervades college classrooms. 
Undeniably one of the purposes of any college course is to increase 
the students’ store of usable facts. From much of the curriculum we 
might infer that this is the only important purpose in going to college. 
It is not so. But, frankly, it is a real purpose, an honest one. It is 
not so much a case of storing facts that shall in after years be promptly 
recalled on request, like so many cartridges stored in a mental maga¬ 
zine, each ready to go off on demand. The wider and deeper aim is to 
increase the range of acquaintance of the mind, to give it a sub¬ 
conscious foundation for a purposeful structure that is to come later. 
Facts form a necessary apperceptive basis. They are bridges leading 
in many directions. They furnish for the living room of the mind a 
sort of indirect lighting that illuminates shadows and enables future 
work to go forward smoothly. So the storing up of facts is a proper 
purpose. 
But facts are interesting in their relationships. They lead by induc¬ 
tion to principles. Whereas facts are limited and exclusive, laws and 
principles are limitless and inclusive. Facts are the minute pieces of a 
mosaic. Principles are the pattern. A knowledge, then, of principles 
and laws is a further purpose of college training. 
These things, facts and principles, are external. But it is the 
purpose of a college education to train the student to think for himself; 
to make his own observation of facts; to draw his own safe and sound 
conclusions. In the words of Coleridge, “to educate is to train to 
think, for by active thinking alone is knowledge attained.” In the 
exercise of this function the student is to construct his life’s program 
of activity. And so it is a third function of college training to help 
the student to realize his best possibilities in his life work. 
Yet, even this is not the summit of college aims. We should be doing 
