Certainly, in the sphere of education there is a growing belief that some radical reform is needed; and this dissatisfaction is in itself wholesome.  Boys come into college with no reading and with minds unused to the very practice of study; and they leave college, too often, in the same state of nature.  There are even those, inside and outside of academic halls, who protest that our higher institutions of learning simply fail to educate at all.  That is slander; but in sober earnest, you will find few experienced college professors, apart from those engaged in teaching purely utilitarian or practical subjects, who are not convinced that the general relaxation is greater now than it was twenty years ago.  It is of considerable significance that the two student essays which took the prizes offered by the Harvard Advocate in 1913 were both on this theme.  The first of them posed the question:  “How can the leadership of the intellectual rather than the athletic student be fostered?” and was virtually a sermon on a text of President Lowell’s:  “No one in close touch with American education has failed to notice the lack among the mass of undergraduates of keen interest in their studies, and the small regard for scholarly attainment.”

Now, the Advocate prizeman has his specific remedy, and President Lowell has his, and other men propose other systems and restrictions; but the evil is too deep-seated to be reached by any superficial scheme of honors or to be charmed away by insinuating appeals.  The other day Mr. William F. McCombs, chairman of the National Committee which engineered a college president into the White House, gave this advice to our academic youth:  “The college man must forget—­or never let it creep into his head—­that he’s a highbrow.  If it does creep in, he’s out of politics.”  To which one might reply in Mr. McCombs’s own dialect, that unless a man can make himself a force in politics (or at least in the larger life of the State) precisely by virtue of being a “highbrow,” he had better spend his four golden years otherwhere than in college.  There it is:  the destiny of education is intimately bound up with the question of social leadership, and unless the college, as it used to be in the days when the religious hierarchy it created was a real power, can be made once more a breeding place for a natural aristocracy, it will inevitably degenerate into a school for mechanical apprentices or into a pleasure resort for the jeunesse doree (sc. the “gold coasters").  We must get back to a common understanding of the office of education in the construction of society, and must discriminate among the subjects that may enter into the curriculum, by their relative value towards this end.