THE OXFORD MOVEMENT

The $20,000,000 endowment sought by Yale University marks another step in the advance of American education along lines long followed by Oxford and Cambridge. The major part of the endowment budget is intended to provide an adequate personnel to carry out a system of collegiate honors similar to that of the English universities.

Men of high academic standing will be permitted to give up classroom attendance to concentrate on individual study supervised by faculty members. This plan largely parallels the tutorial system in force at Harvard, and has as its aim the establishment of a more thorough and deliberate college course, with no sudden and bewildering transitions from class to class. It is significant that more than half the endowment will go for the improvement of the instruction of the freshman year.

Following closely upon the adoption here of the pre-examination respite, this program of the Yale authorities indicates the trend of though in modern American education. Generally guided by English models whose worth has been proved through centuries as Oxford and Cambridge America is gradually arriving at a same and supremely practical plan that testers the intellectual growth of the ambitions student and at the same time tends to eliminate the haugers-on who encumber the colleges. Education is after all a matter of and for the individual, and the educational trend of the present day shows an endeavor to broaden and further the score of individual interest and development.