WHAT IS A GENERAL EDUCATION?

President Hutchins of the University of Chicago wants to revive the scholarship of ancient Rome and Athens. In the current "Harper's" he takes sharp issue with Mr. Conant, and offers as the ideal General Education the study of rhetoric, logic, mathematics and the classic books. The President is headed in the right direction, but he is on the wrong road.

Correctly he says that an education should sharpen the wits and discipline reasoning. Good intellectual habits are established by studying logic and mathematics, but the same mental exercises come from a workout with other and more valuable subjects. Chemistry and Physics train the mind exactly as do abstract problems, and they in themselves are useful to know. As Mr. Conant stated at the Tercentenary, colleges must find "the modern equivalent of the older educational disciplines."

Besides tuning the mind, a General Education gives a cultural background. This President Hutchins claims to spring from first hand study of the classic authors, whose books have "the premanent truths and the common elements of men". Herein lies the danger of falling off Scylla into Charybdis. The exclusive use of original writings can be just as "degrading" as reliance on corrupt text-books. For example Newton's "Principia" and Marx's "Das Kapital" are excessively difficult to understand and they are crammed with irrelevancies and theories now known to be wrong. It is as waste of time and effort to plunge through such morasses unaided. Commentaries and lectures which show the relation between events and the growth of doctrines double the value of an old book. Students who read nothing but specialized research may miss the forest because of the trees. Dr. Hutchins does not realize that the average man picks up more from commentators and critics than from primary sources. By turning the clock back he would throw away the improvements of nineteen hundred years and would snatch education from contact with contemporary problems.