SUMMER EDUCATION

Springing from an idea born sixty-two years ago in the brain of Asa Gray, distinguished botanist, the germ of summer education has spread from Harvard until today there are over 100,000 students in 356 colleges in the United States under instruction. Courses at Cambridge in biology, chemistry, and geology followed quickly in those days when Boston was floating on the flood-tide of a renaissance of intellectual interests, and the brilliant foreign professor Louis Agassiz intoxicated the sages of Concord with natural history. The gradual enlargement of these courses into a regular Summer School of Arts and Sciences and its subsequent growth was but the work of time.

That summer education has a definite value is testified by the popularity which it has achieved. Especially intended for teachers who can improve their methods of educating students, and work for a degree during their vacations, it has proved so successful that in 1920 a special Graduate School of Education was formed here. Psychological investigations into the realm of education, moreover, have shown that intensive short term study of one subject is an extremely efficient method of learning, and that more material can be retained by grasping the whole field at one time. Not the least of the advantages which this form of education offers are economy, appeal to the ambitious, and interest for the layman. Closely related in purpose to summer schools are correspondence institutes, night schools, and extension courses which have had tremendously beneficial results in universalizing higher learning and diffusing technical knowledge.

Since the depression the enrollment for summer schools has been effected even more seriously than the universities. Although unemployment has resulted in increasing library circulation throughout the country, the people who have constituted a large proportion of summer school registration in many cases have had to dispense with the luxury of education for the bare essentials of living. It is deplorable that poor and in some cases dishonest municipal financing, which was put to the acid test by the depression, had deprived many instructors of their pay and slashed salaries thirty per cent. In spite of the obstacles of the times and the fact that more than one hundred schools lost money last year, Harvard among them, only two have closed their doors. Over a long period of time summer education has justified its existence; it is only unfortunate that such a valuable adjunct to progress and culture should be so helplessly at the mercy of the vagrancies of economics.