Possible Limitations of the Elective System.

II.

The preceding paper has sufficiently discussed the impossible limitations of the elective system, and has shown with some minuteness the grounds of their impossibility. By limitation of choice some appear to mean making choice less. I mean fortifying it, keeping it true to itself, making it more. Control that diminishes the quantity of choice is one thing; control that raises the quality, quite another. Old educational systems are often said to have erred by excess of authority. I could not say so. The elective system, if it is to possess the future, must become as authoritative as they. More accurately we say that their authority was of a wrong sort. There are two kinds of authority, - the authority of moral guidance, and the authority of repressive control. Which shall college authority be? Authority is necessary, ever-present authority. If the young man's choice is to become a thing of worth, it must be encompassed with limitations. But as the need of these limitations springs from the imperfections of choice, so should their aim be to perfect choice, not to repress it. This moral authority is what the new education seeks. As the elective principle is essentially ethical, its limitations, if helpfully congruous, must be ethical too. They must be simply the means of bringing home to the young chooser the sacred conditions of choice, which conditions, if I rightly understand them, may compactly be entitled those of intentionality, information, and persistence. Many assert also that boys come to college with no clear intentions, not knowing what they want, waiting to be told. It is true. The majority of the freshmen whom I have known in the last seventeen years have been, at entrance, quite deficient in serious aims. But from this fact I draw a conclusion quite opposite to the one suggested. It is systematized election, which these boys need. Prescription says, "This person is unfit to choose keep him so;" laissez-faire says, "If he is unfit to choose let him perish;" but a watchful elective system must say, "Granting him to be unfit, if he is not spoiled, I will fit him." At Harvard, methods of furnishing information are pretty fully developed. In May an elective paphlet is issued, which announces everything that is to be taught in the college during the following year. Consultations with instructors about all courses are frequent. That most effective means of distributing information, the talk of students, goes on unceasingly, With time, perhaps, means may be devised for informing a student more largely what he is choosing. The fullest information is desirable. And now granting that a student has started with good intentions and is well informed about the direction where profit lies, still have we any assurance that he will push those intentions with a fair degree of tenacity through the distractions which beset his daily path? We need, indeed we must have, a third class of helpful limitations which may be influential over the persistent adhesion of our student to his chosen line of work. To establish onward-leading habits, therefore, should be one of the chief objects in devising limitations of election. The habit wanted is the habit of spontaneous attack. Prescription deadened this vital habit. Election invigorates the springs of action. I believe study at Harvard is to-day more interested, energetic, and persistent than it has ever been before. But that is no ground for satisfaction. A powerful college must forever be dissatisfied. Each year it must address itself anew to strengthening the tenacity of its students in their zeal for knowledge.