CAVALCADE

Nearly three hundred years ago Harvard College was founded by men who wished "to advance Learning, and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust." Beautiful as this expression may be, it is foul with the church-ridden egocentricity of church-ridden men. For Harvard College, and for American education, there has grown a larger purpose, consonant with the modern concepts of life, perhaps more cynical than that of the Puritans, but one which has already proved more fruitful of human happiness. It is the greater, modern concept which would have Everyman performing his allotted tasks, deriving from life share of earthly enjoyment in due measure.

President Eliot was the first head of Harvard to conceive and attempt to realize college training which should be training for life. Before his reforms the college curriculum was a beaten track, the benefits of which were a few tags, a few poor "accomplishments" like those accomplishments prized by the woman of the Nineties, which marked a man as educated. Beyond that the gains of education were largely incidental--a little disciple, a few hard-won pleasures.

t is a President Lowell's deserved glory and some justification for Harvard's bloated pride that the regime closing with the last "Lawrence Lowell Degree" today has had over before it the high ideals which President Eliot inaugurated. Those radical innovations, increased scholastic standards, the tutorial system, the House Plan, all have as a final purpose the attempt, not to further obscure researches in obscure sciences, but to fit young men to fit in the world.

The goal toward which Harvard has been moving is yet far in the distance. The purpose is still not generally understood, the machinery erected to effect it is ill-adjusted and insufficient. After today the burden of carrying Harvard College along the path to perfect education will be that of James Bryant Conant.