"THE GREAT WORLD" MYTH

Whenever a graduating class of college men gathers together for the last time, the average observer who marks the occasional black of cap and gown benath the tranquil June sky inevitably hears, like an echo from some forgotten source, the magic words: "Out into the great world." Each generation that has graduated and grown old has tinged this period with roseate vagueness until all the days of youth become "carefree" and all the trees have become immemorial elms. Memory is usually kind to the college years, and the returning grad of the nineties condenses them into a pleasant bundle of names and anecdotes neatly tied with a red diploma ribbon.

Whatever may be the value of this conception of college as the pleasant interlude before life "in the great world" begins, it is obvious that from a practical point of view college training is often viewed as a doubtful advantage by the great world itself. According to a press appearing in the adjoining column, "perhaps it is less that college training really equips men for important roles in life as it is that the college offers at least a recognized system of some sort of training, is convenient and conventionally accepted, and works better than no system at all."

This damnation by faint praise is the result of the prevalent idea that college is exclusively a preparation for life and thus is quite removed from actual living. Judged entirely on a basis of earning capacity, this is, in most cases, quite true. But where is that epigrammarian who will say: living is earning a living? Or where is that educator who will say: we are speculating with amorphous clay which will not come to life until we give it the power to earn a daily wage? To consider the college years as a pleasant pre-natal period before the first plunge into the outer air is as useless as to consider life merely as the brief interlude before an immortality. The same elements exist in college that exist in the earning weld.

Critics of present-day institutions of learning are too apt to consider the college as a meditative brooding-machine for the hatching of bread-winners. Not until undergraduates realize that school, college, and later life are a continuous curve, not until graduates cease to separate college from the "great world" will these critics cease to be right.