GIVEN THE WILL

To the well-known charge of overemphasis on outside activities Dr. Henry S. Pritchett, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, adds the more serious charge of collegiate insincerity. Schools and colleges, he says, pretend to do more than they can really accomplish, and hence the real indictment against them is their insincerity.

The old bogey of "too much extra-curricular activity" is too familiar to need much discussion. Everyone admits that outside activities have been over-emphasized, but educators, interpreting these activities through eyes trained under different conditions, are too much inclined to magnify the evil. But the charge of insincerity in colleges is more serious. This "pretense of doing more than can actually be accomplished", to which Dr. Pritchett gives greatest prominence, is, after all, a charge that colleges do not really "train the habits and powers of the mind"--the aim of a liberal education according to Dr. Pritchett.

No college, it goes without saying, can graft an education onto an unwilling student. The institution opens its doors as a place in which knowledge can be acquired. The acquisition, however, is dependent on the active cooperation of the candidate for a degree. Where such cooperation is not shown, the fault lies not with the college but with the student and his previous training. Although every college graduates a certain number of men who have only technically qualified for a degree, on the other hand it develops some men of the highest intellectual ability, who more than justify the claim that the institution has really educated them. There is some insincerity in granting a degree to unfit men, but none, certainly, in claiming that real training can be imparted, given a willing student.