THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS

One example of the various attempts to correlate secondary school and college education and to make the transition casier for the entering freshman is the sending out of a letter by the college office to the headmasters of certain prep schools asking them for recommendations as to the abilities of the candidates for Harvard, whether the boy should take four or five courses, and even asking for advice on specific courses which the boy should take.

Although on the face of it this is merely a means taken to correct the usual haphazard assignment of courses by an uninterested and more or less uninformed freshman adviser, it is also an indication of the difficulties encountered in assimilating the various types of students entering every year and starting them off on congenial and not too discouraging work.

Harvard has not been exempt from the rush towards college since the war, and while scholastic standards have been steadily rising to hold back the mob at the door, this policy of exclusion has operated to the disadvantage of many men of low average intelligence but otherwise fully endowed with strong character, personality and other desirable traits. The University is beginning to hear complaints along this line from alumni who found no trouble in earning their gentleman's C's in the gay nineties but whose sons are in the process of flunking out or haven't even succeeded in passing the entrance exams.

Such paternalistic measures as having the headmaster choose his courses for him will never permanently ease the strain on the student of low intelligence sufficiently to assure him an easy and enjoyable passage through the university, and sooner or later educators will realize that under existing conditions college is fast becoming the privilege of the gifted few and that no matter how-strong his character or his will power the less scholarly student is out of place there.

If society ever recovers from its fetish of a college education, the secondary schools may be relieved of some of the burden of cramming for college boards and may be able to evolve a broader and more elastic system of education whereby students of mediocre ability can be given a more satisfactory fitting for the world without loss of social prestige.