MAL DE SIECLE

When recent graduates of American colleges begin to apply the cold, clear light of reason to educational problems, deserting fictional pabulum for genuine analysis, the future assumes a brighter aspect. A few are heading towards this end, a stalwart valiant few. In the May Forum Edward C. Aswell offers his theory for what is known as the suicide wave among students. He begins by pointing out that as a wave the number of deaths amounts to no more than the annual tide which has always swept in from the uncharted seas of adolescence, bringing disaster in its wake. Nevertheless, objects the writer--and this is at once his most salient and vulnerable point this tide is too enormous, too appalling, to be accepted as fate. Some place between matriculation and the commencement platform there is an evil--one which has no place in the lives of what in all correctness may be presumed to be the hope of the nation.

Unlike other critics whose sole purpose is wholesale destruction, Mr. Aswell has more or less definite ideas for the improvement of what is an unfortunate but over-advertised situation. In a previous article he argued that modern science and modern university education have removed many cobwebs from the youthful mind but as yet they have added nothing with which to refurbish the renovated area, no new creed which might serve as a guiding light; nothing to soften the rigid skeleton of science has been introduced.

It is along this same general trend that Mr. Aswell continues to work--this time in search of a remedy for melancholia. And, if he reaches a conclusion which although more intelligent is essentially no more correct than that of most of his predecessors it is not because he does not understand his material. Where he fails--in explaining "student suicide"--and there will be those who will deny that he has failed --is in his segregating a student from the general classification of youth. Education, however profound, however inspiring, can never hope to cope with the vagaries of the adolescent mind. In the nineteenth century it was called mal de siecle, mal de Rene, Werther-sickness--any number of names. Today it bears the label of "student suicide", probably because the public is now interested in students or at least in thousands of boys and girls who are termed students. But even before the advent of science, this disease was known, and appreciated. It was not success fully diagnosed then nor will it over be as long as the terrifying breach between childhood and maturity remains--the most dangerous of the dangerous ages.