Out of the Strait-jacket

The last pre-Freshman year of a school student is haunted by the ominous specter of college entrance examinations. If his grades are poor, he is naturally worried; if his grades are high, he resents the necessity of having to prove his merits by supplying stereotyped information at a given date. The student whose plight may be classed in the second category requires a change in the present hide-bound restrictions.

Not long ago, Dartmouth accepted for admission next autumn twenty pre-Freshmen, giving them to understand that their last year at school was to be spent in a pursuit of education unhampered by the necessity of cramming for June College Board Examinations. Here was a reasonable provision for the ability of the student of outstanding scholastic promise, the man of such talents that it was detrimental to his education to keep him on the level of his ordinary classmates. It was a recognition of the fact that a year may be more profitably spent than on cramming to make sure of high-stand entrance examinations.

Harvard recently agreed to accept, from a well-known preparatory school, a handful of students who should be exempt from entrance examinations. A stand among the first five or ten of the graduating class would be sufficient to secure admission. This was another logical step in the cutting of the red tape which makes the passage from school to college an educational task rather than a natural evolution.

The recent tendency thus seems to be to allow special rules to the college candidate of special abilities. Such a course allows the student to concentrate on fields of interest, rather than to spread his knowledge over vast areas of unrelated materials. It allows him to enjoy some of the liberal advantages of the new curriculum while he is still at school. If consistency is of any value, Yale too ought to make concessions similar to the ones reported above, for such concessions would be simple extensions of the ideas now to be found in the new course of study.

To strait-jacket a highly intelligent school student is to commit a crime against education: to allow his liberty of study, (not to be confused with freedom from work), is to placate the gods of Wisdom and Learning. It is not hard to see which of the two courses of action Yale should pursue. --Yale Daily News