SIGNPOSTS TO PARNASSUS

Two years ago the CRIMSON published the first criticism of courses to be written by undergraduate and printed in an undergraduate publication in the history of education in this country. It was greeted both as heresy and as enlightenment, as a sign of progress and as a sign of the degeneracy of modern youth. There were those who like it, and those who disparaged it, and even those who refused to read it.

It was particularly objected in the past that the writers of such criticism as that in the Confidential Guide were not qualified by their academic achievements to express an opinion. To argue thus, one must hold that every course in college should be planned, organized, and conducted for the "A" man, that the student who ranks in other than the top section of the college should be disregarded in the ordering and arranging of his education. The fallacy here is obvious. It is equally so, however, in the larger question of whether the student should express his opinion at all, regardless of his academic qualifications to an opinion. For education is something apart from mere erudition, or age, or title. It is a process. And if anyone is qualified to appraise and value that process it is the person most intimately involved in it.

Today there appears the third Confidential Guide. In the interval that has elapsed since the publication of the first recognition and even encouragement of the student's constructive part in the formulation of his education has become increasingly more general due to the cumulative effect of a legion of small incidents demonstrating the possibilities of such student activity. It is hardly too much to say that only with those who see education as something dead and sacred a holy mystery sacrosanct from inquiring eyes, a cut to be accepted with quick faith and stifled question, will such a venture as the Confidential Guide now find disfavor.