Rhodes Scholar Contrasts Comparative Maturity of Oxford Freshmen With First-Year Men in Our American Colleges

The following is quoted in part from a recent article in School and Society by H. P. Perkins, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University from 1923 to 1926.

Oxford does a great deal to make sure that most of the business of education has been completed before university life is begun. That is the real secret of her success. It is not merely a question of relying upon strong currents of English culture to lay hold upon a youth and sweep him into the way that he should go. Important steps are taken by the university to encourage these tendencies in the schools.

Each college has a large number of scholarships, and there are twenty-one colleges. The scholarships are given in every conceivable subject. There is always a financial reward attached, ranging from $1,000 to $50 a year. Some of the scholarships are restricted to particular schools or to particular districts.

Speaking generally they serve as a reward for good work in the school and an incentive to good work at the university (since they will be taken away if the student rests on his laurels). Naturally many boys could not go to the university if they did not exist. When they are won by a well-to-do boy the stipend is commonly resigned to the next man on the list until a needy man is found, but the title with its honors is hold by the winner. The main reason for having them is that the work is better done than it would otherwise be.

Examination System

The effectiveness of this scholarship system depends on the nature of the examinations on the basis of which scholarships are given. If the examinations are so framed that everything the student has to offer is called forth, competition will make the school training more and more thorough. If the examination is put together stupidly one kind of preparation will serve about as well as another. Or, what is worse, the mechanical and shortsighted kind will be most effective, and there will be no tendency for the school training to become more educative. Now with so many scholarships and so many examinations there is bound to be a good deal of variety. It would take a more intimate knowledge than I possess to make a precise estimate of the system. But it is clear that an attempt is made to test the candidate's thinking power, his command of English, and his mastery of English history and literature, as well as his knowledge of the subject in which the scholarship is given.

English Freshman More Mature

This helps to explain the comparative maturity of the English freshman, his tendency to know what he wants to study at the university. He has a good basis for making a choice between different disciplines.

Say it is a classical scholarship which he has been pointed at since he was fourteen or fifteen. He has been brought to the point at which he could read the most difficult Latin and Greek literature at sight in large quantities. He is a thorough master of two grammars and to a surprising degree this knowledge has been reduced to illuminating principles of language structure which make the later attack on German, French and Italian much easier for him. And naturally French and Italian are easy when approached with a first class Latin vocabulary, while many of the compounds in German are made in the same way as in Latin.

This has been done largely by work in small groups or alone with a master. He knows what concentrated independent work is long before he comes to the university. This has a direct effect on his capacity for choice of university work. He has had a good deal of provocation to think, and naturally he thinks about himself. This would be true of any material which was taught concentratedly and thoroughly in small groups, but Greek and Latin literature have a peculiar tendency to stimulate self knowledge. And of course he thinks about other things, the impulse having been aroused. His home has usually supplied him with plenty of excellent modern material for thought.

Original Thought Stressed

But his classical scholarship is not given merely for mastery of Greek and Latin. The examination will demand an essay, calculated to test his powers of original thought and expression, and a general paper which demands a fairly thorough saturation in English history and literature. Here again the school has gone out of its way to "polish him up" and the result is that he has had plenty of experience in concentrated reading in fields other than the classics. These fields also have a peculiar suitability for provoking thought about himself.

Thus his elections are likely to be rational, and a change in the university is likely to represent an organic development of his personality.

These changes are frequent. The best classical scholar of my year had specialized in mathematics at school until he was thirteen or fourteen. Of the four men in my class at Queen's who distinguished themselves in classics at the end of their second year, two went over to European history. Professor A. N. Whitehead, now of Harvard, did classics at school, and has since distinguished himself principally in mathematics and philosophy. It is erroneous to think of this scholarship system as fixing the boy's line of development. In a way it makes change more likely by insisting that the boy get a thorough taste of what he first elects to do at school. And it is sufficiently well rounded so that there are several disciplines he will be able to pursue with success.

Oxford Men Study Greece

In many American colleges you will find a majority of the best students working at English literature. You will find a great many more good men working at European history and at the social sciences. This seems to be a logical way of trying to comprehend one's environment. At Oxford nearly all the best men are studying Greece and Rome instead of a modern civilization, and they are concentrating on Greek philosophy. Oxford looks hidebound. It is difficult to see how any one who emerges from a prolonged bout with Plato and Thucydides can be ready for "Sex" and "Labor."

At Oxford very few of the good men bother with a training in English literature or European history. They have already been pretty well saturated in these things at home, and the scholarship system encourages it in the school. The interest has been built up so well that it can be trusted to nourish itself. The English undergraduate is infinitely better prepared for labor problems by drinking in politics at every pore than is his American equivalent by a course in American National Problems. English families sometimes cat and sleep politics, American families tend to be bored by them. I do not mean to say that the English undergraduate is really well prepared for labor problems, I only say that he is better prepared than the American freshman. He has read much more about his won country's history, and in better books. It is hardly our place to sneer if the Englishman feels at eighteen that he will now learn more about his country by going a long distance away to look at it. He already knows it directly better than we know ours, and he can afford to try another angle. He goes to Greece and Rome.

Classics Read Carefully

First in Honor Mods a year and two thirds, or five terms, of epic, drama, and oratory. Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles Aoschylus, Homer, Lucretius, Demosthenes and Cicero. Remember that he is quite capable of getting through the thousand odd lines of the "Bacchae" in one long night when he first appears in Oxford. Then on this foundation Greats--two years and a third, or seven terms of history and philosophy. Thucydides, Herodotus, Livy, and Tacitus, and most of all Plato's "Republic" and Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics." This is supplemented by Bury and Meyer in Greek history and by Descartes, Hume, Kant and Croce.

Readers who are acquainted with the "Republic" will remember how it begins with an appeal to traditional wisdom and proceeds to discuss a minor Greek poet. Homer is cited again and again, Aeschyins appears here and there. The English student of Greek philosophy is able to begin the "Republic" with a background as much like that of Plato as any modern youth can attain. In Honor Mods and at school he has been saturated in the same poets. He can supply an apt quotation where Plato has not bothered to do so. He becomes intimately acquainted with Greek history and Greek institutions. He is able to deal with Plato as the quintessence of the Greek mind. After he has worked out Socrates' refutations of sophists who are as Greek as himself, the student passes on to criticisms of the Socratic position in the notes of Aristotle. He has thus explored a grand civilization in a number of its aspects.

Philosophy Merely a Background

When he uses a Greek idea as a clue to his own environment, his suggestions are not the abstractions of a doctrinaire philosophy out of touch with its fellow men. They represent in the students' own mind the reflections of philosophy genius on a society which was itself a work of genius, a society whose depths had been lit to their furthest reaches by fishes of poetic fire. All this background of the philosophy has been made accessible to the student.

For this the command of the language is an absolute sine qua non. Inexperto crede. I have attempted at various times to become familiar with Greek, but have not had much success because of my late start. The more I try to understand the major monuments of the Greek world, the more I am baffled by my inability to be sure exactly what significance is to be attached to the expressions on which arguments and descriptions turn. A smattering is better than nothing, and so is a dictionary, but there is no substitute for intimacy.

The student returns from his long tour with the scaffolding of a civilization laid bare, the structure and interconnection of its parts outlined in bold relief. He looks for such connections in his own environment with a boldness which often astonishes. He says, for instance, that experts ought to rule, that there is a connection between wisdom and good government.

Insistence on Method

This positive approach to modern problems is fostered at Oxford by dogged insistence on a method.

Thought requires the preliminary selection of an opinion which serves as an hypothesis for discussion pro and con. In the course of the student's work on a number of different fields within his chosen Honor School he considers several such hypotheses. But if the work is to be done with care the number of them must be small. And they must be related, so that the discussion of different suggestions begins to interact and provoke thought.

Greek philosophy offers very attractive hypotheses. This is not the same as saying that Plato is nice to read. Most of the dominant currents of western life were concentrated at Athens, and where-ever the same interests come together again the Greek way of finding a place for all of them is bound to exercise a powerful fascination. Moreover a method had been evolved by abstract philosophizing for dealing with these various interests. An intensity of social life had been achieved which fused them together in the common consciousness and demanded the highest type of poetic expression for the new unity. Plato formulates the conclusions of a very complete civilization, and only a very incomplete one could fail to find them worth discussing.

"The Greeks," says Nietzsche, "are simple. That is why they make the best teachers."

Long Vacations

The Oxford way of allowing long vacations establishes a very nice balance between the processes of saturation and gestation on one hand and of definition and formulation on the other. The work which is to be gone over in the eight weeks of the Oxford term has been assigned at the beginning of the previous vacation, which varies from six weeks (Christmas and Easter) to four months (summer). It is an unwritten law that you must not attempt to take as a basis for a formal essay anything which you are reading for the first time.

The success of these reading vacations depends first of all on the school which has built up a habit of independent work, and on the home which has also contributed to this, and provides peace and quiet, and an atmosphere in which serious reading is taken for granted. It is I think noteworthy that when the Oxonian goes home for his six weeks' Christmas vacation he attends five or six dances in the course of this period. Sometimes he goes abroad, or to some part of England other than his home, with a group of kindred spirits. The possibility of making steady progress without help from his usual instructor naturally grows with his experience of university life. And the concentration of his program makes much of his vacation reading repetition--a new attack on an old favorite, with many suggestions and problems of formal study to mull over and clarify in a fresh stream of impressions. The principal works are usually begun in the vac, then given considerable attention in a series of essays, then browsed over at odd times. Some months later they will again form the staple of vacation review preliminary to the final grind