Trade School or College?

To the Editor of the Crimson:

Democracy and industrialism are bringing before educators a most pressing and interesting problem; it is the problem of giving men and women a cultural education on one hand, and a vocational training on the other. It is a particularly pressing and irritating problem to the university authorities who consider the university as an institution consecrated to the task of giving men and women a cultural education and who now find more than 90 per cent of those in the universities seeking and obtaining a vocational training. To these authorities the problem is pressing because the man who comes to the university for a cultural education is not getting exactly what he wants. He is being treated with the same nervous haste as those who are preparing themselves for the nervous industrial world. The man who want a cultural education more or less demands the ease of the club or drawing room. Why, then, should he be rushed with the rest of the dizzy world?

These advocates of the classical tradition in education wish to distinguish between the man who wants a cultural education and the man who wants a vocational training. They do not think that vocational training is unnecessary or that it is to be regarded with indignation; they do believe, however, that those who are students of factory or business management, scientific poultry raising or agriculture should be trained for their professions in vocational or trade schools, thus permitting the college and the university to remain symbolic of that which it was originally symbolic: of the Arts and Sciences.

In making this distinction between vocational training and cultural education educators have particularly in mind the American colleges. They desire that the college should be an exclusive institution which shall contain only men who love the Arts and Sciences instead of business and money; where the club-room dominates over the class-room; where a man learns to live instead of to earn money; where the atmosphere is one of poetry and music instead of industry and dollars; in short, where the mind is taught to find peace in spiritual rather than material things.

To make the college such a place, it is necessary to exclude from within its walls those who think of education merely in terms of dollars. Sidney H. Blackstone '26.