BEAUTY IS TRUTH--"

It has become somewhat of a convention among professors who are apostles of the older order in education to adopt an attitude of well-bred superiority whenever mention is made of introducing vocational subjects into college curricula. Consequently it is refreshing to hear a new voice crying in the wilderness. Professor Edman of Columbia in the October "Century" maintains that the citadel from which the cultured professors sneer at their more practical-minded brethren is itself far from impregnable. He charges that these scholars are lecturing as if their classes were all composed of independently wealthy youths being fitted for sinecure positions in a "gilded Utopia" and that the result is a number of graduates filled with a love of the True and the Beautiful but with only disgust and neglect for the actual world.

The number of students affected in this way is probably much smaller than Professor Edman would have one believe. The average undergraduate seems rarely to find his love of abstract Beauty and Truth so strong that is causes him to shrink from existence. However, there are undoubtedly a considerable number of sensitive men who go through such an experience. That this is an evil seems self-evident. Education is simply instruction in the art of living, and when it becomes divorced from life it loses all its meaning. The fundamental remedy for this situation as for a considerable number of other educational evils, seems to be the appointment of instructors who are men before they are professors. Closer contact of the Faculty with the the individual student might well go along with this. Then, too, it might be well to get more of the English 17 spirit into college courses and mix saws, hammers, and electric bulbs with the discussion of lofty theory. The result might be a few less Babbitts and, hot house lilies and a few more men of the English type; men who can close down a desk at the War Office at three in the afternoon and at five be lecturing on Aesthetics at Oxford.