William Trufant Foster

“ What we do mean to say is that the genius of such men is enjoyed by exceedingly few of the men and women who are regarded by the world as highly successful. Mr. Roosevelt, for example, can hardly be called a genius. He himself insists that all he has accomplished is due to dogged persistence and a capacity for hard work. Without these qualities, not a human being—genius or no genius—has ever attained a great success. All the "just-as-good-as" men have not yet found a substitute for hard work. ”

“ The traditional conservation of colleges is not stimulating to thought. New ideas disturb the academic calm. The teacher is most comfortable who stays in the beaten path, teaching what he was taught and teaching it in the same way. Unless the teacher takes resolute measures to resist the deadening influences of his position, his thinking is in danger of confinement to a small and diminishing circle. This is the danger implied in the saying that every occupation has its disease: painters have painters' colic, plumbers have lead poisoning, and college professors have the academic mind. ”

“ The world needs to-day, more than it yet knows, leaders equal to the task of improving human life in manifold forms of social service. The world needs to-day in commerce, in manufacturing, in banking, in mining, in distribution, in transportation, men with a conception of the meaning of their enterprises and their opportunities far beyond the scope of technical preparation. The world needs to-day available men and women equal to the tasks of leadership in the government of our States, our nation, especially of our cities. ”

“ After entering college the boy continues his studies in the philosophy of education under the tutelage of a sophomore. His tutor informs him that the object of education is the all-round man. The faculty and the curriculum, he explains, are obstacles, but the upper classes rescue the poor freshman from pentagonal and other primitive shapes and round him out with smokers, hazing, initiations, jamborees, and visits to the big city, where he makes the acquaintance of drinks and ladies far more brilliant-hued than those of his somber native town. ”

“ What shall we say of this far-reaching modern movement to adapt education to the immediate needs of all people? What shall we say of teaching of trades to the children of elementary schools? What shall we say to the overshadowing of the remotely practical subjects of the secondary-school curriculum by immediately practical courses? ”

“ But why strive for high rank in the college? Why not wait for the more "practical" studies of the professional school? Hundreds of boys the country over declare to-day that it makes little difference whether they win high grades or merely passable grades in the liberal arts, since these courses have no definite bearing on their intended life-work. Almost invariably they are ready to admit that they must settle down to serious effort in the studies of law, medicine, engineering—that is to say, in professional schools. ”

“ Dean Fine said to the alumni of Princeton University: "The typical boy entering a college like Princeton in these days is much more vitally interested in other boys and in sports than in books. To him the lure of college is not in its studies, but in its life." Professor Churchman of Clark College regards success in athletics and the social life of the college as "the honest ambition of an appalling proportion of fathers and mothers who are sending their sons to fashionable colleges, in the same spirit that accompanies their daughters to fashionable finishing-schools." ”

“ It is true that some colleges are so loosely put together that a student can loaf until the last week of the term and then scrape through by a kind of death-bed repentance. Not so in the severer trials of life beyond the campus. "In the moral world," as Charles R. Brown puts it, "a man is judged not by the few holy emotions he can scramble together in the last fifteen minutes of earthly existence; he is judged by the whole trend and drift of his life." ”

“ Is high scholarship worth the effort? In other words, have colleges devised courses of study which bear any relation to the probable careers of students? Is there any evidence that a man who attains high marks is more likely to achieve success after graduation than a man who is content with passing marks?
If there is any such connection between success in studies and success in life, it should be possible to measure it by approved statistical methods, and thus arrive at conclusions of more value as guidance to the undergraduate than the opinion of any man. ”

“ The shortcomings of our methods of marking students, until recently in almost universal use, surely amount for some of the cases in which academic distinction has not led to corresponding distinction in later life.
Other cases are due to the sudden appearance in later life of more powerful impulses for work than those of school years. A boy who has sauntered along the primrose paths of college life contrives to graduate. Suddenly he faces death, or loses his property, or falls in love, or goes to war, and forthwith he is a man born again. ”

“ If a college undergraduate is ready to be honest with himself, he must say, "If I am consistent with mediocre work in college, it is likely that the men in my class who graduate with honor will have three times my chances of success in the Law School, and the men who graduate in my class with highest honor will have nearly ten times my chances of success." ”

“ To increase in years and resources and yet retain the splendid enthusiasm of poverty and youth appears to be as difficult for institutions as for men and women.
Yet so rapidly are colleges changing that conditions seem to pass away under our very scrutiny. The West of to-day is a new West. Even the far West is already a long generation beyond frontier days. The colleges are keeping pace with the country, not only in material prosperity, but in spirit and ideals. A larger proportion of the families are well-to-do, and a larger proportion of boys and girls resort to higher schools. ”

“ Those who do not comprehend the vital significance of the college of liberal arts in our national life, those who do not perceive its mission outside the scope of professional and technical schools and great universities, those who have acquired the American habit of attempting to estimate educational service in terms of numbers of students, extent of departments, grandeur of buildings, and size of salaries, may not understand an institution concerned with ultimately practical education and therefore content with small numbers. ”

“ The "undergraduate" does well to complain of the "alluring ease of the environment," for the growing tendency toward luxurious living if one cause of the wane of intellectual enthusiasm among college students. The New England colleges one hundred years ago provided a better environment for study than they provide for all their students to-day, and the most magnificent of modern graduate schools has yet to show whether it will prove more stimulating for scholarship than the humblest college of a generation ago. ”

“ No subject can be sensibly considered apart from the animating purpose of the teacher, the attitude of the student, and the dominant spirit of the institution. Any subject may be partly cultural—dressmaking, for example, and sign-painting and blacksmithing. Under certain conditions, for certain persons, much studies would be chiefly cultural. Any study, on the other hand, may be practical, as Latin was in the Middle Ages for every one who studied it, and as it is to-day for every one who teaches it. ”

“ It is sometimes difficult for such a boy to comprehend fully what a great convenience it is, for one who wishes to write, to have something to say.
Then there is the man who is ambitious to become a public speaker. He does not care to study logic and psychology and history. Not at all. those studies may do very well for people who have plenty of time and no definite aim in life. As for him, he wishes to become a public speaker, and therefore he desires only a course in public speaking, and that a brief one. ”

“ I am no genius."
No more are most men who are called successful. Genius has been defined as "an infinite capacity for taking pains." Edison has put the matter more epigrammatically, if not more elegantly, in calling genius 1 per cent. inspiration and 99 per cent. perspiration. Neither definition is adequate. What the world calls genius has never been accounted for solely by hard work. If both inspiration and perspiration are necessary for success, it is nonsense to ask which is more important. ”

“ A specialist is supposed to have a thorough knowledge of one comparatively small field, but he cannot understand one small field except in the manifold relations of other fields. The greatest specialists—to use a phrase of Doctor Crothers's—"specialize in the humanities." The greatest colleges—to use a phrase of Matthew Arnold's—help men to see life steadily and see it whole. The liberal curriculum is designed to furnish every man with lasting means and incentives for measuring the narrowness of his own mind. ”

“ Both the professor and the sport are in danger of arguing from exceptional instances — each is likely to find striking cases in proof of his preconceived notions; each is inclined to scorn the opinion of the other.
But conclusions drawn from large numbers of cases, not subject to invalidating processes of selection, and employing terms that are adequately defined for the purpose at hand, must command the respect of all men. If such conclusions do not support the contention that it pays to study, there is something radically wrong with the professor's part of college affairs ”

“ In a saloon at a prairie station in Montana I saw the sign, "Luck beats science every time." That is the motto of the gambler—in the saloon and in the class-room. But all men who have won durable distinction are proof that science beats luck—science operating through the laws of heredity and habit. ”

“ In our haste to prepare every boy for a special job, let us throw off our blinders—especially those of us who regard ourselves as "practical" men. I repeat it: education for such leadership is no less practical than the education of plumbers and bookkeepers. Yet the chief subjects of the liberal curriculum are usually called cultural, not useful. ”

“ He has made his own way in the world by force of ability and hard work. But when it comes to his son, he is the most credulous creature alive. He is ready to believe that something can be had for nothing. When he sends his son to college the last thing he thinks of is that the lad will have to work for all that he gets. ”

“ Yet training for the highest type of leadership is not a wholesale business, is not, in fact, a business at all, is personal rather than mechanical, and, therefore, has no concern with quantitative standards of success. It is still true that at a great university a boy may go through college, but at a small college, more college may go through him. ”

“ Every college which has been a long time on the same spot has ideals. The youth is supposed to get these ideals, though he is unconscious of them at the time. In after-years they will be explained to him at the class reunions and he will be glad that he absorbed them. Toward the end of his college course he will show signs of superiority to his parents, and there will be symptoms of world-weariness. He will be inclined to think that nothing is quite worth while. ”

“ Schools of dentistry and pharmacy, of advertising and household arts, of business and commerce, have brought their students closer to vocational problems. There are technical schools striving to prepare for almost every position in life, from pearl-diver to aviator, and the aim is always efficiency. Their courses are, for the most part, immediately practical, and their students, for the most part, are bent on acquiring the greatest possible amount of obviously useful information and experience in the shortest possible time. ”

“ If all these studies prove anything, they prove that there is a long chain of causal connections binding together the achievements of a man's life and explaining the success of a given moment. That is the non-skid chain that keeps him safe in slippery places. Luck is about as likely to strike a man as lightning, and about as likely to do him any good. ”

“ We have had leaders of great stature in the past—prophets, editors, inventors, social reformers, captains of industry, poets, statesmen—but the greatest of them, in so far as they have been prepared for their life-work by formal education, have depended, not on brief vocational schooling, but on the broadly cultural and ultimately practical education of the college of liberal arts. ”