OXFORD IN AMERICA

Dean Wilmot B. Mitchell of Bowdoin College, in the remarks which are at Bowdoin regularly attached to the report of the President, cautions the American college against surrender to the Oxford movement. If the movement be foreign in operation as well as origin to the educational idea, American style, it should be stamped out immediately, for no disease has proven more contagious. But at Harvard, which may be considered the seat of heresy, the weaknesses of transplanting have proved to be not hereditary from the native soil of England, but peculiar to a loam that has been badly sanded by the American secondary school.

Dean Mitchell believes that the superior intellectual background of the Oxford man entities him to the privilege of scholar's freedom while the American student "needs the give and take of the recitation room and the careful, almost daily, guidance and supervision, not of one instructor but of several." Such treatment does not go to the core of difficulty which lies in the smattering methods of the secondary schools. These have, in turn been foisted on the school by the college entrance system of credit units, which emphasizes the distributive in college entrance system of credit units, which emphasizes the distributive in college preparation and wholly overlooks the concentrative.

As long as the painspot is thus under the skin, such palliatives as that of Dean Mitchell can have only a lulling effect. Only when the college man is thoroughly grounded in the elementaries, and has plumbed deeper that this in his field of special interest, can he be placed fully upon his own in academic responsibility. But he must be gives "cause and will and strength and means to don't," even if he never attains the intellectual precocity of the English student. He must have time, as well as incentive, to study alone. A single self-won thought will proclaim itself within him worth all the chalk talks of all the classrooms.