Of these two, the first has to do with the college curriculum, but I need to devote little time to this for the principle has already been developed and applied in a singularly stimulating and lucid book called “The Liberal College,” by President Meiklejohn of Amherst, to which I beg to refer you.  The scheme is a remarkable blending of the prescribed and the elective systems, and provides for the freshman year five compulsory studies, viz.:  Social and Economic Institutions, Mathematics and Formal Logic, Science, English and Foreign Languages; for the sophomore year European History, Philosophy, Science, Literature, and one elective; for the junior year American History, History of Thought and two electives, and for the senior year one required study, Intellectual and Moral Problems, and one elective, the latter, which takes two-thirds of the student’s time, must be a continuation of one of the four subjects included in the junior year.  It seems to me that this is a singularly wise programme, since it not only determines the few studies which are fundamental, and imposes them on the student in diminishing number as he advances in his work, but it also provides for that freedom of choice which permits any student to find out and continue the particular line along which his inclinations lead him to travel, until his senior year is chiefly given over to the fullest possible development of the special subject.  The fad for free electives all along the line was one of those curious phenomena, both humorous and tragic, that grew out of the evolutionary philosophy and the empirical democracy of the nineteenth century, and it wrought disaster, while the ironclad curriculum that preceded it was almost as bad along an opposite line.  This project of Dr. Meiklejohn’s seems to me to recognize life as a force and to base itself on this sure foundation instead of on the shifting sands of doctrinaire theory, and if this is so then it is right.

For after all there is such a thing as life, and it is more potent than theory as it also has a way of disregarding or even smashing the machine.  It is this force of life that should be more regarded in education, and more relied upon.  It is the living in a school or a college that counts more than a curriculum; the association with others, students and teachers, the communal life, the common adventures and scrapes, the common sports, yes, and as it will be sometime, the common worship.  It is through these that life works and character develops, and to this development and instigation of life the school and college should work more assiduously, minimizing for the moment the problems of curricula and pedagogic methods.  If I am right in this there is no place for the “correspondence school,” while the college or university that numbers its students by thousands becomes at least of doubtful value, and perhaps impossible.  In any case it seems to me self-evident that a college, whatever its numbers,