FEEDERS OF FACTS

"The lecture system," it has been sagely observed, "Is a device to transfer facts from the notebook of a professor to the notebook of a student without passing them through the head of either."

This proposition is of course indisputable. No one who has faced for four years the professorial rostrum and felt facts flow in at his ears and out at the point of his pen would for a moment deny it. It is one of the inescapable features of the system--apparently bred in its bone--that if once you stop to think you lose the thread of the professor's discourse, and the thread of a professor's discourse is not an easy thing to pick up again.

The matter has its converse aspect. There is the legend of the professor and a Harvard professor it was, too, who was pursuing the even tenor of his lecture when a student raised his hand for a question and inadvertently he recognized him. The student asked his question and the professor turned to his notes. "It doesn't say," he admitted. More guarded was the Anglo-Saxon instructor who lost his copy of Caedmon and dismissed the class for a week.

These cases simply represent the fullfilment of the ideal of education of the Freshman who denounced his professor for a long list of assigned reading on the ground that it was the professor's duty to do the reading himself and report its content to the class. A fact in the notebook is worth two in the head is the watchword of the educational mechanist. And there is of course great truth in the principle for facts in the notebook are convenient when approaching examination prescribes review, and they don't get in the way afterward.