ATTITUDES TOWARD EDUCATION

"What are you going to do after college" is a question of many answers. "Why are you going to do it?" has usually but one; to make money.

The old ideal of education is vanishing under our eyes. "How to live" gives away for "how to make a living."

Business efficiency and intellectual mediocrity are the guiding spirits of the modern educational institutions of America and the end of that, training is "dying in the harness" or a comfortable but an idle and empty old age. This change in ideals is the natural result of an epoch which places Production above Humanity; which strikes a strident note of movies, cheap Lingazines, jazz--anything to take the place of constructive thinking. Chicago's grand opera company is dying for lack of support; the centers of real culture, in the East are very small oases in a very Large desort. These facts disclose a truly lamentable condition; they mean that Ruskin's. "There is no wealth but life" is being discarded for the "Goddess of Getting On."

The college, student's ambition is not alone confined to making money; he must make it in a "respectable" profession. Politics is a "dirty" game; therefore he will not enter it. Quite true: it is a "dirty" game, as Messrs. Hylan, Tufts and Pelletier are most conclusively proving. But carefully sidestepping politics will not improve it, nor will it give Socialists and I. W. W.'s any less ground for accusation and discontent. The profession of education is carefully avoided for its unremunerasive nature; the deplorable result of this is obvious.

American universities are certainly not what G. K. Chesterton calls English universities: "The playground of the rich"; practically every man in the colleges of this country intends to work for his living. That is as it should be; but there in little sanity in working for what cannot be enjoyed; and comfort is not the half of enjoyment. A comfortable living in much to be desired; but there is no reason why it should entirely crowd out social, intellectual, educational service, the "levelling up" of the nation. College men are most fitted to be the motive forces for better conditions by heritage, endowment and acquisition; an equipment that must, however, teach them to get the most out of living to be stimuli for advancement in the communities of the nation.