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An interesting relationship is discoverable between the announcement of the Guggenheim scholarships, the speech of Mr. Young on the establishment of the Walter Hines Page School and Dr. Goodnow's discussion of the possibility that Johns Hopkins University may abandon its undergraduate degree and devote itself to graduate and research work alone.
The Rhodes scholarships were at bottom a political gesture in a broad sense of that term. They were designed not for their influence on knowledge so much as for their influence on the students, and they were a picturesque reflection of the nineteenth century's belief in political and social salvation through mass schooling and the dissemination of knowledge. But while the dissemination of knowledge has done a great deal it has not done all that was hoped for it. The Guggenheim scholarships are designed not for the students but for the study they may do, and they reflect the awakening suspicion that it is not the dissemination but the getting of knowledge that demands our attention.
It is in the same spirit that we find Mr. Young asking an endowment for a research school of international relations rather than for the institution of "civics" classes in the grade schools. And President Goodnow, who has only recently seen the establishment of the new undergraduate department of Johns Hopkins at Homewood, complete with elaborate buildings, extra-curriculum activities and a rising football team, seems to be doubting the value of that sort of thing and looking toward a university of students rather than of people who go to college. There are plenty of places where people can be taught, but there are perhaps too few where a generation that is beginning to need it pretty badly can have new information and better science dug out for it.
"Research" is beginning to crowd "education" as the current slogan. The education of every one is important, but with all its education the poulace still seems to follow as closely as ever the leadership of its most intelligent and forceful men, and the education of the intelligent and forceful men is therefore perhaps more important still. As Mr. Young said, they need facts; and thus it is that the scientific method, after having weakened, is now reviving the old popular attitude toward learning knowledge as a thing of value in itself. New York Herald-Tribune
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