IS COLLEGE FUTILE?

The most severe arraignment of college education which has ever come to the attention of this department is here reprinted from a plain, honest, fearless, and now defunct, little paper called "The Villager".

"Colleges depend upon Industry now, to be sure, and are coming more and more so to depend. It is because so many kodaks are sold that the College enlarges its philosophy department, and pays the astronomy professor a living wage. It is because the cigarette business, the pig iron and sweet chocolate business, do so well that the College can build new laboratories. On the other hand, captains of Industry would not make these generous be-guests to the College if the College turned out educated men and women. Educated men and women like to read the same book more than once; they like to ramble and reflect; they prefer simple pleasures; they are, if not actual enemies, at least no assistants to the manufacturers of silk undergarments and cosmetics and high-priced cars. Industry prospers by reason of people who do not get their pleasure from Ideas but need Things to amuse them, playthings, who must have constantly changing and costly pleasures, who run about in motor cars, and delight in fads and fashions and luxuries of all sorts--100 per cent consumers, that's what Industry needs to keep the wheels revolving. The College furnishes plenty of them. Industry need not fear the College; the proportion of educated which it effects is so small as to be negligible, and is more than offset by the fact that the College makes the sons and daughters of coal-miners and immigrants "refined", and refinement means a taste for chintzes and silk socks and sedans and renting-library fiction and fancy soap. The College helps Industry. Industry helps the College. Allies . . ."

The thoughtful student need hardly ask himself if the charges are true. To read them is enough to carry conviction that the writer saw with unusual clearness the principle failings of college students, taking them in a jump the country over.

Every year an innumerable horde of boys and girls from every variety of home storm the citadels of learning drawn there in the main by a common belief that college is a blessed institution for increasing money-making ability. And every year a similar multitude of young men and women are sent forth to their sordid battle from the gates of our colleges armed with a sheepskin, a bundle of new desires, a few common-place rules of economics, and with hardly a trace of originality among them--an army of pygmies fresh from the mold. The procession is a sufficient commentary upon the general state of college education.

Colleges erect immense new buildings, install new systems, set enrolment limits in the thousands--in short, strain every resource to accommodate more thousands. To what end? Their Gargantuan efforts have certainly not blessed the world with a new Republic of wisdom and virtue. No one but a blind optimist would pretend so. What the mammoth machine has done is to make society over by creating a new class which has given the characteristic color to American life: a complacent, materialistic, pleasure-seeking class of half-educated men and women.

And yet America seems not a whit appalled by the apparent futility of her experiment. Perhaps its sequel proves that the great majority of mankind is immune to any extraordinary intellectual growth. Education, beyond its elementary stages, implies a capacity for development which may be non-existent in the majority.

Why, then, do not the colleges renounce the impossible and start anew on more solid ground? Implicit in the democratic idea is found a redeeming paradox in numbers. American colleges throw open to every youth a real equality of opportunity to carry his own development to the highest point of which he is capable. And so far as American colleges provide sufficient elasticity in their systems--a striking tendency of the last few years; so far as they take care in this way not to superimpose upon the exceptional student an equality of condition with the majority: just so far will the hundredth student justify in himself the waste of effort on the other ninety-nine.