SELECTIVE EDUCATION

Segregation of the various grades of students in a college seems to be the principal objective of the many new schemes that are being promulgated this fall by American college presidents. Swarthmore's system, as recently outlined by President Aydelotte, would be to divide the college into two groups, the brilliant scholars and the mediocre; and to demand of the former a greater amount and a higher standard of work for their degrees. The details of this plan show it to be entirely superfluous in a college having a liberal curriculum; and, moreover, it is highly doubtful whether students in any college would submit to being pigeon-holed in so cold-blooded a fashion.

The many schemes, similar to this one, that are being broached are little more than pipe-dreams, for none of them has been actually tried. It remains for a women's college to take the lead by putting into practice the simplest and sanest device that has yet been suggested. Barnard College has adopted a "Special Honors Course", by which according to Dean Gildersleeve, a limited number of unusually able students will be permitted to study in their chosen field and at the same time be exempt from the larger part of the ordinary routine, prescribed courses and other impediments to a liberal education. They will be given free access to the privileges of the graduate schools, and will be relieved from all examinations except a comprehensive one at the end of their senior year. Barnard is thus going one step in advance of the tutorial system adopted in some departments here, in approaching a practical American adaptation of the English university system. Barnard will continue to develop ninety-five per cent of its students into good, all-round, intelligent human being and citizens, trained intellectually, physically and socially; but it will also avoid allowing the chosen five per cent to become narrow-minded specialists. For, says Dean Gildersleeve, "we will admit into the course only students with such intellectual ability and interests that they can absorb enough knowledge of philosophy and economics, or example, to make them intelligent citizens, without taking definite prescribed courses in these subjects".

American universities are on their way and what is more they know where they are going. A member of our own faculty recently prophecied that within ten years the Senior at Harvard would spend his entire time reading, practically at his own discretion, for a general examination. That may seem a somewhat bold prophecy now but when we observe the experiments in this direction being made by Barnard and others colleges its realization seems less remote.

The Crimson has received a good many letters of complaint like the one below. It is unfortunate that some undergraduates feel they have been treated unkindly by the H. A. A.; yet even they will admit that nothing can be done now, that admittance to the Stadium will at least give them a chance to join the battle against the Elis; and that with a week's campaign to beat Yale before us, all discussion of the ticket allotment should be withheld. After the game the problem may be tackled with a view to making impossible next year what has apparently been unavoidable this fall.--Ed.