"IT'S CLEVER, BUT IS IT ART?"

The secret is out. Harvard undergraduates are "clever", and her graduates "uneducated". This is the indictment of The Old Dog in the Saturday Evening Post of October 11. Along with much that is complimentary both of the University and the student body, the subtle charge of "cleverness" carries a distinctly derogatory implication. Instead of higher learning Harvard is accused of producing "hot house results", of developing "point-of-pencil knowledge", and high technique in the art of passing examinations. The Old Dog says of the unfinished product: "Most of these fellows were ready with opinions on any conceivable subject. If they had none, they were able to make them up on the spot."

Even granting a certain surface truth in what he says this latest college critic has surely allowed himself to be misled by what are mere "outward shows". No doubt he reaches a true appreciation of some Harvard men, or even of a certain class of them; but he is not justified upon such evidence in proceeding to a wholesale indictment, or in leaving the impression that his charge applies to that abstract, composite, and illusive phantasm--the Harvard man.

When he cites as proof of his accusation against the graduates, that if anyone should ask them what part in the world war was played by Peter the Great or Frederick II. . . . by the treaty of Utrecht or Paris, and should be met by indignant silence, the suspicion is aroused that a pedantic hankering after specific facts has clouded his conception of what education is, or ought to be. One might retain from his schooling the answers to all the above questions, and much more besides, and yet lack education in its true sense.

It is not the ability to summon up a catalogue of facts, as from a bottomless well, that marks the educated man from the uneducated. It is the capacity to use facts and see their relations. Thus among Harvard undergraduates who are keenly alive to the present, those events in the past which bear upon the present interest them in proportion to this relation. When Tottel's Miscellany appeared, or who the first Merovingian king was, may be required in a course, but after the examination it is so much deadwood, and as such is speedily forgotten. Four years of plowing through courses, and sifting of facts, however, bring out certain significant relations, and the earnest student begins to see more clearly some of the outstanding problems that face his generation. Already he may have trends of thought which suggest possible solutions. If he gets this much out of his college course, he has got all that can be expected of him, for, by the strength of this vision, he is an educated man. Upon him will fall the conduct of the world's affairs, and in so far as he leaves them better than he found them, by so much he has justified his education.