"What Is Wrong with Our Colleges?"
By F. D. Starr
THIS is the heading of an article in the Review of Reviews for April, 1914. Statements made in this article indicate unmistakably that leading educators see there is something wrong in the colleges and universities. Speaking of wrong ideals and wrong standards that have been finding their way into these institutions, one writer says: "We had indeed gone far towards making social and athletic Chautauquas of what should, indeed, be institutions of learning. . . . A youth with lanky legs or good wind was a hero, whereas another with intellectual ideals and with the faculty of hard mental work was an 'old maid.' Our A. B. more and more became an empty bauble, an unmeaning, nondescript thing." Woodrow Wilson is quoted as having said, in 1907: "You know that with all our teaching we train nobody; you know that with all our instructing we educate nobody." "Some things discipline the mind and some do not. Some things are difficult and some things easy; and nothing so disciplines the mind as that which is difficult." The article closes with a very suggestive statement of what constitutes true education: "We desire strong and vigorous bodies, not with the avowed purpose of becoming professional acrobats, but for all the contingencies of coming life. So the training of our mental bodies is for all the contingencies of coming life,—the higher and leading forms of life and labor. We must return from the scattering and the dilution of these last decades to these simple but essential truths." It would be well for parents, and all who have the responsibility of providing education for youth, to look about to find schools where "simple" and "essential truths" are taught. We may thank God that there are some schools of that kind. We will not select the school where football, or some other barbarous sport, has a conspicuous place, and the "youth with lanky legs or good wind" is counted a hero, to the disparagement of useful and intellectual pursuits. The Lord "taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man. The Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear Him." Ps. 147: 10, 11. Instead of patronizing institutions where empty baubles may be obtained, but where training and education in the essential truths and duties of the present time are not to be expected, how much better to select a school where the fear of the Lord, the beginning of wisdom, is the motto in every endeavor!