COLLEGE AND THE PASSING WORLD

In the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Paul V. West, Assistant Professor of English in the University of Wisconsin, asks the question: "What do college students know?" and answers it by saying that they lack of distressing amount of knowledge of simple facts supposed to be in common parlance. To substantiate his assertion he presents the following results of an information test given to a group of students chosen at random:

"Four per cent of them would be willing to ask a dairyman if his cows were Leghorns. And when six per cent do not know what an Artichoke is, while six more assert it to be a fish, three a lizard, and one, no doubt thinking of the strangling powers (choke) of a boa constrictor, claims it as denoting a snake we cannot help but wonder in what world these sixteen per cent receive their information--or lack of it." And of especial interest to Harvard men is the following quotation from the article:

". . . out of one hundred students who wish to attend Yale University, four would have to look in an atlas to know that part of the world they were bound for, while six would purchase railway fares for Ithacs, and thirty-six would proceed blithely on their way to Cambridge."

Many other equally amusing errors are cited, but, as the author asserts, cease to be amusing when one considers that those now in the colleges are to inherit the responsibilities of citizenship. Here is much food for thought. It would seem that the elementary and secondary schools, and even the homes are not fulfilling their task of fundamental education. And to quote Professor West in regard to the responsibility of the college in this direction: "Students are being taught to answer quite glibly academic questions of a decided erudite character, while at the same time they are losing contact with the world about them". It is the old appeal not to isolate the college from the outside world. Yet this appeal should not be made to the college alone, but to the individual. The college has a right to assume that its undergraduates possess the rudimentary facts of knowledge, and it is the duty of the undergraduate to fulfill this expectation. There is no reason, however, why the class-room of higher education should not encourage to a greater extent the continuation to a greater extent the continuation of interest in general facts and current events.