NEW FOOD FOR THOUGHT

The change which has suddenly come over the aspect of English A can best be likened to the sudden burst of sunlight when the lowering clouds have blown away. If the course proves as interesting and as valuable as the advance notices presage, the time may come when incoming freshmen no longer try to avoid it by the way of the anticipatory examination.

The purpose of the innovation is twofold--"to give the student some idea of the contribution of these fields of human knowledge to the advance of civilization, and to aid him in his choice of subjects for Concentration and Distribution". General summaries of science, philosophy, language, and other departments of human knowledge have before this been instituted here. But the correlation of all these departments has never previously been tried. The prospect at the outset appears little short of bewildering but whether or not the breathless freshman can assimilate the whole, one valuable thing will be accomplished. Heterogeneous reading of groups will be replaced by definite subjects with compulsory investigation and some intelligent though on what men of some intelligent thought on what men of letters have said about the several subjects. A conception, however vague, of the basic facts of life and civilization is better than a vague inkling of Belloc, Walls and Chesterton.

In its second aim English A will do what the articles written by the various departmental heads did last year. And the English A method will be more effective because practically the whole freshman class will of necessity hear about the possibilities. At the same time there will be another opportunity not mentioned in the prospectus. Since the lectures are to be given by professors from each field, every student will have the chance to decide for himself what speaker is to him most coherent and therefore which he wishes to follow in the future. Beside all this there is to be commended finally the new interest which will be created in a hitherto dispirited course. It was scarcely just that a student should have been required to accept the rather faste less fare previously offered. By this rejuvenation the obligation has not only become just out has even lost much of its "obligation" flavor.