AN ATTEMPT AT ARCHITECTURE

In an editorial printed on Monday entitled "Carpenters and Architecture" the CRIMSON criticized somewhat unfavorably the editorial policy recently published by the Yale News. What was criticized was not the conservatism of the policy, for conservatism is often as valuable as it is dangerous to assert, nor the individual suggestions for change, timely and good in themselves, but the fact that these suggestions only skimmed the surface.

At a time when, as the Yale News points out, education is on the theshold of its greatest test in history, in the course of which it must either fail completely or prove that it can be of benefit not, as in the past to a select group, but to a far wider and ever widening circle of mankind--at such a time any reforms, suggestions or policies must, to be successful, strike at the root of the matter. Within a short time with, as has already been pointed out, the general level of wealth rising and the prestige of a college degree still unimpaired, the demands on the colleges will be far in advance of anything they have ever previously known. To meet these demands the system of college education must undergo chances. To meet them adequately it must undergo changes that are far sighted enough to be far reaching.

For an undergraduate paper to attempt to recommend what those changes should be would be presumptuous. But within its province does lie the suggesting of issues and the expression of opinion looking towards a system which will meet, in the best spirit of education and democracy the problems which await the colleges within the next generation. Such suggestions and opinions can, however, be of permanent value if offered as parts of one consistent scheme. To follow a figure formerly used, planks can be of real value only if serving as part of a structure, or of at least a scaffolding. Some such scaffolding as an aid to intellectual architecture the CRIMSON hopes to construct in the course of the next few weeks. Of necessity of a skeleton nature and weak in many points, it may offer one or two steps for future builders or at least something which it will be profitable to fear down.

If it is generally conceded that colleges exist for education, the question becomes one of method. Will that education be given or attained? If given, how, and by whom? As long as a college degree was regarded as a mark of social distinction it was perhaps only laudable that educators should do their best to couple with it some forcible education. To such an idea, perhaps is due the present regulated and restricted method of imparting education. But for the future something else must be devised a system which based on the assumption that students are really seeking education, will allow educational facilities to exist at their best and develop, to their utmost, and at the same time allow those who seek learning to attain it as they will.

That students will seek learning for its own sake will not be due to the millenium, but to natural causes developing more and more rapidly. When these causes produce their effects the administrative machinery now existing in colleges will become completely incapable of dealing with students as they are now dealt with. To take care of the future undergraduates as they are now being cared for would require a legion of deans and a stadium for records. True now, it will be equally true then, that the cheapest and most economical way of caring for an individual is to let him care for himself.

What this will involve is a transfer of the initiative for study--which has heretofore, and especially during the past ten years resided in the college office--to the individual student himself.