THE DRAWBACKS OF COLLEGE LIFE.
THIS is an age of curiosity on all sorts of subjects, of asking questions, in short, but not always of asking them well. The interviewers who abound are very little aware how much preparation goes to the asking of a good question, and how very much more preparation goes to the giving of a good answer. And there must be not only a trained mind both in the questioner and the answerer, but a real desire on both sides to gain and give the information that is the object of inquiry, though very often neither the questioner nor the answerer knows exactly how to define what that object is. When " interviewers " go in the name of a newspaper to ask the kind of questions which will elicit what the public most want to know, it very often happens that neither the ques- tioner nor the answerer is particularly desirons,—it may be, desirous at all,—that the public should be really enlightened. Sometimes it will answer the purposes both of the corre- spondent and of his victim much better to miss the trne focus of interest, and to ask only the more convenient questions which can be answered without embarrassment to either party, but with a good deal of amusement to those who read the account of the interview. However, we do not care so much just now to go inta the questions and answers which are really meant to interest and amuse without throwing too much light on a subject,—though that is the state of mind of more than half of the interviewers and inter- viewees,—as to point out the difficulty of asking the right question and giving the right answer in cases where both the interrogator and the person interrogated would gladly do all they could to ask and answer the very thirg which the public chiefly desire to know, but are really more or less unable to define precisely what that object of inquiry is. We have especially felt this difficulty in reading the account of a question and a multitude of answers con- tained in the current number of the Forum as to what a number of young men and women had found to be "the best thing their College did for them." Now, in this ease, the question is put by a. highly educated American gentleman Mr. Oliver Howard, who knows very well what he wants to know, and his question is undoubtedly a very good question, but he would have done better to add another to it,—namely, whether, to the knowledge of those whom he interrogated, their College life had had any disqualifying as well as a qualifying effect, whether it had deprived them of any instinct or aptitude which they could see in greater per- fection in young men or women of the same general calibre of character, who had not had a College career. We believe that if Mr. Howard had asked this ques- tion also in conjunction with the other, he would have helped those to whom he addressed his question to answer the first question more effectually, though perhaps with less unqualified confidence. For undoubtedly the inter- lude of College life between the school period and the actual apprenticeship to practical business, unfits men,—and we sup- pose women also,—for a good deal which they would other- wise do with more ease and expertness, as well as fitting them for that which they could not otherwise do at all. Everybody knows that in some of the arts, unless you begin very young, when both the physical and mental organs have been only half.formed, the fall attainable amount of elasticity and delicacy of aptitude is never gained. A pianist must begin very young. For the highest skill a rider must begin very young. For the purposes of many trades and manufactures and commercial enterprises it is hardly possible to begin too young. Education is, as Mr. Bain has told us, discrimination. Butte attain the highest attainable power of discrimination in a particular calling, you must avoid filling your mind with delicate discriminations which, so far from being in any way germane to that calling, really divert it from that calling, and which may cause a sort of distaste and indifference to the habits and occupations which would best fit you for that calling. If you want to educate a boy to be a juggler, you can hardly fix his attention too early on the fine manipulations, the sleight-of-hand, the vigilant observa- tion, and the general wide-awakeness of perception, which are necessary to juggling. Now we are Li.r from saying that logical and philosophical science show any moral analogy to juggling, but unquestionably the subtlety and fine discrimination required for logic and philosophy do need an early, if not quite so early an initiation, and do pre-engage the mind in a manner which is very apt to disqualify for many other pursuits. One of the young ladies interrogated as to what her College life at the Cornell University did for her, replied, with evidently a keen sense of the die- ralifications which College careers sometimes involve, "That I am a better cook because I am a College-bred girl, is s proud boast with me." And no doubt she had a right to be proud. More than half her contemporaries might probably have replied, if the question had been put to them, that they were worse cooks for being College-bred girls, that their interests had been too much diverted from the kind of expert- ness which a practical life requires, to the kinds of interest which the intellectual life inspires. We feel little doubt that half the young men whose fate it is to immerse themselves in business of a rather exacting kind,—the kind of business which needs quick and sagacious judgment of the characters of men, and of the significance of certain expressions of countenance,— lose instead of gaining aptitude for that alert insight by the ac- quired habits resulting from an extended intellectual education. Theyaccustom themselves to dwell on a class of discriminations which are of no use to them in their practical career, and to ignore those which are of the greatest use to them. An Oxford don, replying to Mr. Howard's question as to what College life had done for him, says that it had enabled him "to loaf well." "There is no place for it like the streams and gardens of an ancient University." That is a very good reply, but it contains one of the best reasons why a College life is positively injurious to a considerable number of practical men. They do not want the kind of teaching which enables them to loaf well, but the kind of teaching which renders it difficult for them to loaf at all. We do not deny that loafing is an excellent accomplishment, and that no man or woman who cannot loaf well can count himself or herself truly accomplished. But the highest accomplishments of one sort of life are the worst banes of another. A good University education is almost essential for the wise and worthy employment of a life of leisure, for fostering the finer interests of speculative thought, of fastidious tastes, of spiritual discernment, of moral discrimination. But all these are not qualifications but disqualifications for a life of practical sagaeities and rough and ready judgments. As Mr. Bryce acutely observed the other day, President Kruger had had the great advantage of never having been spoiled by a University education.
Most of the answers given as to the advantages of a collegiate education are very true answers. The close contact with men of high intellectual and moral force, of which many of the young men speak with enthusiasm, is doubtless full of both charm and moral advantage, and the constant collision of mind with mind as between young contemporaries, has a still greater charm and brings with it a still greater utility for the purposes of intellectual culture, but both these kinds of advantage have great drawbacks too. The atmo- sphere of culture and discrimination in which these con- ditions steep the minds of College students has a great tendency to give them a strong distaste for the coarser pursuits of trade and manufacture, and to induce that delicacy of taste which is fatal to the promptitude and routine of the counting-house or the shop. We do not believe that the mind which has once acquired a passion for col- legiate studies will often be one to succeed on the Stock Exchange or in the expansion of a mighty mercantile concern-
And again, we doubt greatly whether the academic atmos- phere is always the most congenial for the development of a strong original imagination. Would Homer have written his great epics if he had been to a University ? Would Burns have been the poet he was if he had been sent early to the University classes of Edinburgh or Glasgow ? No doubt there are poets to whom fine University culture does nothing but good,—poets like Chaucer, like Spenser, like Tennyson, like Arnold, like Clough. But there can be little doubt, we think, that Shakespeare would have lost more in spontaneousness than he would have gained in accuracy of Viought, if he had gone through all the discipline of a great University. There is certainly a kind of genius which is far freer and fresher without the constraint which the higher intellectual discipline imposes, than it would be with it. Un- doubtedly the effect of all good University training is to put a bridle on the imagination, and so to deprive a powerful imagination of a good deal of its natural freedom and elan.
It is not that University training diverts men of high imaginative power from practical life, as it does the average man's taste, but that it makes them too critical, too self-intro- spective, too fastidious for the highest purposes of intellec- tual life, unless their imagination be like Milton's, one born, as it were, with a bridle already upon it, and subdued to the stately pace of a rich and sonorous rhythm. Where the vital in- tuitions of genius are the first and last characteristics of the poet, such culture as a University life bestows can add little, and may take away much. Milton himself truly said of Shakespeare that in him "Fancy's child" "warbled his native wood-notes wild," and these wild wood-notes the stateliest of academic cages would probably have silenced. Hence it seems to us that with all the great advantages of a collegiate society, academic life is hardly well fitted either to help on the punc- tual discharge of complicated practical duties, or to stimulate the higher flights of a free, buoyant, and wayward imagination.
Previous page
