FullReads

There is nothing novel about the considerations we are here urging. The problem over which university reformers have been laboring in every country during the past forty years has been, how to rid the universities, properly so called, of the care of the feeble, inefficient, and poorly prepared students, and reserve their teaching for the better-fitted, older, and more matured; or, in other words, how, in the interest both of economy and culture, to reserve the highest teaching power of the community for the most promising material. It is forty years since John Stuart Mill wrote a celebrated attack on the English universities, then in a very low condition, in which he laid it down broadly that the end above all for which endowed universities ought to exist was “to keep alive philosophy,” leaving “the education of common minds for the common business of life” for the most part to private enterprise. This seemed at the time exacting too much, and it doubtless seems so still; but it is nevertheless true that ever since that period universities of the highest class, both in Europe and in this country, have been working in that direction–striving, that is to say, either to sift the applicants for admission, by imposing increasingly severe tests, and thus presenting to the professors only pupils of the highest grade to work upon; or, at all events, if not repelling the ill-fitted, expending all their strength in furnishing the highest educational advantages to the well-fitted. In the last century, Harvard and Yale were doing just the kind of work that the high schools now do–that is, taking young lads and teaching them the elements of literature. At the present day they are throwing this work as far as possible on the primary schools, and reserving their professors and libraries and apparatus, as far as the state of the country and the conditions of their organization will permit, for those older and more advanced students who bring to the work of learning both real ardor and real preparation. A boy has to know more to get into either of them to-day than his grandfather knew when he graduated. Nevertheless, with all the efforts they can make after this true economy of power and resources, there is in both of them a large amount of waste of labor. There are men in both of them, and in various other colleges, much of whose work is almost as much a misuse of energy and time as if they were employed so many hours a day in carrying hods of mortar, simply because they are doing what the masters of primary schools ought to do, and what no man at a university ought to be asked to do. It is a kind of work, too, which, if it have to be done in colleges at all, is already abundantly provided for by endowment. No Maryland youth who desires to learn a little mathematics, get a smattering of classics, and some faint notions of natural science, or even to support himself by manual labor while doing this, will suffer if the Hopkins endowment is used for higher work. The country swarms already with institutions which meet his needs, and in which he can graduate with ease to himself and credit to his State. The trustees of this one will do him and the State and the whole country most service, therefore, by providing a place to which, after he has got hold of the rudiments at some other college, he can come, if he has the right stuff in him, and pursue to the end the studies for which all universities should really be reserved.