The Privileged Classes

. . . Perhaps it is true, as Dean Hanford says, that no other large university could have made such a success at the present time, because no other has the foundation that has been laid at Harvard by the tutorial system. There are, however, many other plans of similar intent now in operation in various places. Meiklejohn has at Wisconsin a college where there is no classroom teaching, and the emphasis is on joint research. Rollins College has set its students free from all formal routine for an experimental term of six months. Honor students at Swarthmore and elsewhere take no "courses" at all in their last two years, but spend their time getting ready for the final comprehensive examinations.

Only one college, so far as we know, has gone the whole way and abolished even examinations and degrees, and that one, Pocono, is too small and casual to afford a fair test of this most radical of all academic ideas. Certain it is, however, that a means is going to be found to make the atmosphere of education electric and just turn the student loose in it. The trouble with examinations and monitors and lectures and conferences is that too often they serve as lightining-arresters, diverting the current of knowledge away from the student instead of into the very fibre of his being. Before they can be junked there will have to be eliminated from college all except those who have a serious purpose to study and learn. And before that can be done we shall have to rid ourselves of the false notion that a college degree is a badge of social eminence. Judge.