HE CONQUERED GALAHAD

Pronunciamentos on what a college education is and disquisition on what it ought to be have become as numerous and almost as ingenious as arguments about the Eighteenth Amendment. John Erskine has daff'd them all aside and bid them pass.

"We send boys and girls to college not because that is the time in which they learn best, but because we ourselves have learned no better place to send them during that period of callow, unformed youth." With these words the conqueror of the Tennysonian Galahad continues his illusion-shattering march.

The Columbia Professor's iconoclastic remark, even if it was not uttered solely to goad the audience, is not so cynical as it will sound to some. Even for those who are not consciously working toward any specific objective, college is more than an empty last resource. The comparatively leisurely life of the undergraduate is a welcome boon to those who are anxious to investigate as many of life's possibilities as they can. Though hundreds of students, Phi Beta Kappa as well as C men, are graduated in unconcerned ignorance of those widely different possibilities, other hundreds profit by the leisure of college to look at their future through more than one lens.

Most men's decisions about their careers are leaps in the dark. The danger of leaping too soon is that a person of narrow experience is apt to remain blind to the qualities lacking in his particular existence. Routine jobs mould youth too fast. If college gives undergraduates the opportunity to travel some distance along several roads, if it keeps a man "unformed" until he can share with some intelligence the choice of his form, it is not the worst place to send this same "callow youth."