THE BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE

In the last week the ever present discussion of the worth of a liberal college education has taken an up-curve. And as usual, the debate has been marked by the need of definition, and by the fact that the participants are talking at cross purposes. Much publicity was given the statement of Messrs. Barron and Babson that "New England colleges were failures" because they did not contribute to the prosperity of that section of the country. Taking this as an indictment of education, the pedagogic replies were numerous; of which the address at the University Club in Boston by President Hopkins of Dartmouth was the most outstanding. And arising, not from this particular dispute, but from the conditions that make it typical, there started yesterday in the New York Times Magazine, a series of articles entitled, "The Crisis in American Colleges." Thus a muddled situation is resolving itself into an inchoate philosophy of higher education. What is needed is a systematic philosopher to make an exposition of the subject as a basis for future discussion, and to remove from the public mind the confusion invoked by declarations that the ideal liberal education should be of no practical value.

There exists a general impression that this is the great age of the individual. It is not. As a matter of terminology if a person commits a conventional sin, he is asserting his individuality against hampering taboos. But really it is a time of joiners, of mass movements, productions, and prohibitions, even of mass education.

The day of the robot has not yet come, but H. G. Wells sees it approaching along with the complete domination of the business men. So educators hasten to justify their product to the new monarchs by pointing out civilization's debt for the truths discovered by scientists, and the progressiveness of college trained men. Doctor Hopkins, referring to Faraday and Pasteur, refuted the financiers, but in doing so deprecated the insistence on material results. He testified to the value of "better thinking", to the need of it in a nation where book censorship, the Scopes' Trial, and Mayor Thompson could happen.

"One of the geratest problems," said Doctor Hopkins, "which the American college faces in the present day is to preserve its function as an educational institution to an extent that shall give its men the proper outlook on life and shall steel their wills and harden their minds against the tendencies toward materialism which are bred in a period of so great economic surplus as is the present period in America.

"It is the responsibility of education to scan the far horizon; it is the obligation of education, if need be, to undergo attack, to accept contempt, and to endure derision from contemporaries who are more interested in maintaining their own opinions than they are in knowing what is really so. It is the function of education, when error is found, to denounce it; it is the privilege of education, when truth is found, to proclaim it."

There is a time when much is made of service, rotary wheels, and the doctrine of non sibi. But the individual has a duty to himself of making life worth living which he seldm falls to observe. The average student does not seek a liberal education with the primary purpose of being a tool of mankind. The ability to reason is the unique human attribute, and according to Aristotle happiness is relative to the exercise of this function. Certainly the educated and cultured man, whether rightly or not, feels that his life is preferable to that of the most comfortable and opulent moron. The choice of being Socrates unhappy or a contented pig is not a tactful problem to present to the business sceptic. The college, then, justifies its existence to a graduate, in presenting him with a complete education. It is mrely fortunate that the presence of these educated men has, even indirectly, such constructive results on society that it may convince future Croesuses who would otherwise never admit that it is the prerogative of every qualified man to enjoy pro se the fruits of education.