“Consider the paradox of the rigidity of the university student’s scheme of study, and the vagaries and whims of the scholarly emotion.  Contemplate the forcing of that most delicate of human attributes, i.e., interest, to bounce forth at the clang of a gong.  To illustrate:  the student is confidently expected to lose himself in fine contemplation of Plato’s philosophy up to eleven o’clock, and then at 11.07, with no important mental cost, to take up a profitable and scholarly investigation into the banking problems of the United States.  He will be allowed by the proper academic committee German Composition at one o’clock, diseases of citrus fruit trees at two, and at three he is asked to exhibit a fine sympathy in the Religions and Customs of the Orient.  Between 4.07 and five it is calculated that he can with profit indulge in gymnasium recreation, led by an instructor who counts out loud and waves his arms in time to a mechanical piano.  Between five and six, this student, led by a yell-leader, applauds football practice.  The growing tendency of American university students to spend their evenings in extravagant relaxation, at the moving pictures, or in unconventional dancing, is said to be willful and an indication of an important moral sag of recent years.  It would be interesting also to know if Arkwright, Hargreaves, Watt, or Darwin, Edison, Henry Ford, or the Wrights, or other persons of desirable if unconventional mechanical imagination, were encouraged in their scientific meditation by scholastic experiences of this kind.  Every American university has a department of education devoted to establishing the most effective methods of imparting knowledge to human beings.”

From the same article:—­

“The break in the systematization which an irregular and unpredictable thinker brings arouses a persistent if unfocused displeasure.  Hence we have the accepted and cultivated institutions, such as our universities, our churches, our clubs, sustaining with care mediocre standards of experimental thought.  European critics have long compared the repressed and uninspiring intellect of the American undergraduate with the mobile state of mind of the Russian and German undergraduates which has made their institutions the centre of revolutionary change propaganda.  To one who knows in any intimate way the life of the American student, it becomes only an uncomfortable humor to visualize any of his campuses as the origins of social protests.  The large industry of American college athletics and its organization-for-victory concept, the tendency to set up an efficient corporation as the proper university model, the extensive and unashamed university advertising, and consequent apprehension of public opinion, the love of size and large registration, that strange psychological abnormality, organized cheering, the curious companionship of state universities and military drill, regular examinations and rigidly prescribed work—­all these interesting characteristics are, as is natural in character-formation, both cause and effect.  It becomes an easy prophecy within behaviorism to forecast that American universities will continue regular and mediocre in mental activity and reasonably devoid of intellectual bent toward experimental thinking.”