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ics. Unless my casual observation is wrong, I should say that during the past few years there have been more advances in our knowledge of natural phenomena obtained by the work of scientific investigators than during any decade of the last century. Unless I am wrong in this, the author's statement at the beginning of his paper is certainly not based upon facts.

PROFESSOR WALDO: From some statistics it would appear that the growth in our general courses has been greater than it was before the rush for technical education. The University of Michigan may be taken as a Western type. An investigation shows the remark just made is true in that institution.

Ten years ago the school of liberal arts at Ann Arbor had a membership of about eleven or twelve hundred. Until about 1900, or 1901, it remained nearly stationary at that number. In 1903, the school of liberal arts had a membership of 1,300. Just previous to that time the University of Michigan entered upon the development of its engineering school, which in 1903 numbered about 600. In 1906, the school of liberal arts had increased to about 1,400, as over against no increase for the last few years up to the time of active work in the school of engineering, while the school of engineering had increased to 1,300. While the school of liberal arts did not increase at any such ratio as the technical, yet it seemed to derive a great stimulus from the rapidly growing school of engineering.

PROFESSOR JACOBY: The speaker would like to ask the question whether any one present has made the experiment of holding conferences with students for the purpose of replacing a part of the ordinary form

of recitations? The paper seems to indicate that a conference was held to supplement the regular work. If the regular work was modified in any other way, it would be desirable to know more of the particulars.

It is certainly worth while to consider how the time may be reduced that is ordinarily spent by the student in recitations without lowering the standard of instruction.

THE STANDARDS TO BE PLACED BEFORE THE

YOUNG ENGINEER.

BY JAMES PHINNEY MUNROE,

Treasurer of the Munroe Felt and Paper Company.

A major reason for the ineffectiveness of much of our public schooling is that teachers and pupils have their eyes and thoughts fixed, not upon the real purpose of education, but upon the examination of next week or the promotion of next June. The school and its processes become to them, therefore, ends in themselves. The petty lessons which they teach and learn obscure the broad objects of teaching and of learning, and the walls of the school-room limit their educational horizon. To neither such teachers nor such pupils is it ever revealed that schooling is but a minor means to the true end of education which is, of course, physical, mental, moral, and therefore social efficiency.

The students in a school of applied science have a wider view than this; but in most cases it is an outlook far too narrow. They are aiming, it is true, towards the goal of a professional career; but they usually see in that future profession not an opportunity for social usefulness, not the happiness which is reached through efficiency, not the unselfish devotion of (for example) the "born" physician; they anticipate, on the contrary, merely the power, the money and the ultimate ease which professional success may bring. Therefore, few undergraduates study the subjects in the curriculum because they care for them or because they grasp the relation between those topics and the social organism; they pursue them simply

because those subjects must be overleaped-like obstacles in a hurdle race-by the irksome process called examination, in order to secure a degree. The degree itself they look upon as an end worth working for, since its possession means, usually, a remunerative "job" which will lead to others bringing in, eventually, an income adequate to the bewildering calls for expenditure in modern life.

Were this the attitude of mind of technological students alone, it might justify-or at least explainthe sometimes supercilious attitude of the college of "liberal arts," and might support its contention that its atmosphere is broadly cultural while that of the college of science is narrowly utilitarian. But under modern conditions the outlook of all collegians is practically the same; for, however fondly the elder institutions may cling to outworn forms and terms, however prominently the "humanities" may stand out in their prospectuses, they also are, in truth, colleges of modern science and of the application of science to commercial and industrial life. The cloistered student wrapped in love of ancient learning is still to be found; but he is engulfed in the host of youth who— when they do not go to college simply for sociability and prestige-regard higher education as a kind of trump card in the game of money-making.

More or less unconsciously, colleges of arts and colleges of science alike foster this student attitude of mind by devoting an undue share of the academic year to examinations, by overloading the curriculum with examinable subjects, and by permitting the several schools or departments to emphasize the utilitarian by specializing and intensifying too much. As a result the secondary purpose of a college-that of

instilling information-too often bulks largest in the eyes of all concerned and obscures, or even eclipses, the leading aims of all collegiate education.

Those major aims should be in the order of their importance: (1) To develop manhood out of boyhood; (2) to make the men thus developed broad-gauged, mentally quick and receptive, intellectually catholic, tolerant and modest; (3) to train good citizens, in the fullest meaning of that term; and (4) to equip for industrial and professional efficiency. To accomplish the last is what the technological school is paid especially to do; but unless that professional training is given in such a way as to supplement and strengthen in the highest degree all the other social forces which are making for manhood, breadth and citizenship, the school has defrauded the undergraduate, has failed of its duty as a social agent, and has sealed its own eventual doom.

Even though they be nineteen or twenty years of age, most youth come to a college mere boys in their childish attitude of mind, their undeveloped sense of personal responsibility, their hazy outlook upon life, and their distorted perspective of themselves in the community. They ought to be graduated, however, with their minds ripened and their vision cleared. Indeed the years of their college life will have been largely wasted unless, in those years, they have acquired a mental and moral seriousness far greater than that of the less well educated man.

Limiting ourselves to the school of applied science, perhaps its paramount duty and opportunity is to impress upon a youth as he enters manhood that living, instead of being a game of pleasure or of chance, or a haphazard acceptance of what comes along, is an

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