The American College; A Series of Papers Setting Forth the Program, Achievements, Present Status, and Probable Future of the American College (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE PLACE OF THE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES IN THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM PROFESSOR PAUL SHOREY: The chief lesson that I took away from my old Harvard course in theme-writing was the admonition, " Always write about a proposition, never about a word." It is a sound principle, though systematically ignored by the most successful of American writers, Emerson, and in what threatens to be the most prolific branch of American literature, the literature of education. The blessed word education is the sole theme of most educational discourses. The speaker defines or symbolizes in that Mesopotamia his social ideal, indignantly rebukes our present defection from it, and apocalyptically prophesies its speedy realization by the short cut of a newly revealed method or a reformed curriculum. Ignoring what old logicians called the circumstance?the who, which, what, when, and whereby, for whom, we define education in the abstract as preparation for life or it may be as " a totality of co-ordinate and reasoned suggestions," and then endeavor to estimate the values of particular methods and studies by more or less plausible deductions from this indeterminate ideal. But obviously there is not one education, there are many kinds and grades. And the value and significance of any study relates itself not to education in general, but to some specific type. Nothing is easier than to praise any study to its lovers and adepts, unless it be to demonstrate the uselessness of any study to those who are totally ignorant of it. All men naturally love knowledge, and most men, like Plato's philosophic dog, express their detestation of ignorance by barking at what they don't know. Art em non odit nisi ignarus is the apt inscription on the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. " We all," says Mr. Chesterto...