Student society

“ The mind, placed in actual conscious relations with existing realities and phenomena, should be prepared for the largest service. To know, see, and learn the truth is a preparation for doing. The high type of manhood and womanhood which a liberal culture in college aims to promote should fit the student for every walk of life, in the family, society, church, and state.
Page 142The purpose of a college education should be twofold—professional and humanitarian—to prepare for one's vocation in life, and to cultivate humanitarian sympathies for the largest service. ”

“ The great public school system, all colleges and universities—the entire educational system, high and low—is society's most spectacular attempt to prepare youth to meet the problems of life. However, the collective influence of these institutions is but one factor among many. ”

“ The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization. ”

“ Still they are treated as underlings, while instructors keep school, hold examinations and administer grades. Under present conditions they are filled with ideals of military discipline rather than infused with social impulses. Why may not our universities be transformed into states in miniature or social communities, in which students are "the people," each of whom is tempted by the entire situation, to care, to lend a hand, to feel the thought currents of the time, to know men as well as books, to be efficient units in society? ”

“ The preparation for [Pg 462] this higher education of the masses devolves on the schools and colleges. Their curricula should be so arranged as to arouse “historic consciousness” in the youngest child, to awaken social consciousness, and to provide for its continuous development by starting every boy and girl on a career of self-culture—by matriculating every child in the People's University, the Public Library. In affairs that concern society as a whole, it is better to trust the well-informed common-sense of the people than the learning of the schoolmen. ”

“ On the other hand, the university is called upon to introduce to the state and society successive new generations of young, well-prepared men, who, filled with arranged knowledge, impelled by moral earnestness, preserve and bear the sacred flame of learning through all the perplexities and dark passages of daily life. ”

“ In short, the real government of our large North American institutions is to-day in the hands of the students, however much the faculty may think that they wield the scepter. Honor systems, athletics, college journalism, fraternity life, self-support, curriculum, seminars, unrestrained electives, student researches, and laboratory methods—all these are signs of the new day of student individualism. The parental form of government is less popular; the self-government idea is now the slogan in student life. ”

“ To help such children succeed in school, meet the State academic standards that all children are expected to meet, and graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education and the workforce without the need for remediation. ”

“ The change in the attitude of professors and students towards the needs of the people and the welfare and progress of society, so intimately educational in its nature, seems to me the most promising factor in the movement for college and university reform. ”

“ One student after another shall reap the benefit, so long as the college endures, and specializing in American history, as the student does, sends out into the world a force of wider and yet wider dominance, through which knowledge is distributed and the ideals of our formative period preserved, while practical results are obtained for the student, who is thus fitted to teach and become self-supporting. ”

“ I would see young men and women go out into the world with a true democratic spirit, with a ready sympathy for all classes of people, and with a helpful attitude toward all problems of state and society. The work of any public institution of higher learning is a failure in so far as its graduates fail to honor the state’s claim on them as citizens. ”

“ It is not to be taken for granted that the particular regimen of studies, best fitting the student to pass the entrance examinations of a college or university, is the best possible for the nine out of ten students, who go directly from the high school into the world, and must fulfill some measure of moral leadership for American democracy. ”

“ Is it not well for us that the colleges all over the country still offer to their fortunate students a society of the most democratic sort,—one in which a father's money, a mother's social position, can assure no distinction and make no close friends? Here capacity of every kind counts for its full value. Here enthusiasm waits to make heroes of those who can lead. Here charming manners, noble character, amiable temper, scholarly power, find their full opportunity and inspire such friendships as are seldom made afterward. ”

“ Amalgamated by the uniform course of studies and the similarity of discipline, the separating fragments at the end of the student life carry similar qualities into the life before them, and step with almost remarkable social equality into the world where they must find their level."—Philadelphia North American, July 7th, 1876. ”

“ If we are to raise up adequate leadership for the future, our colleges must contrive to give to students a genuinely liberal education that will make them intelligent citizens of the world; an education that will make the student at home [Pg 276] in the modern world, able to work in harmony with the dominant forces of his age, not at cross-purposes to them; an education that will acquaint him with the physical, social, economic, and political aspects, laws, and forces of his world ”

“ As regards colleges and universities, there are but two things on which we can rely to make studies take hold upon the minds of students, and to receive thorough attention. The first is, love for them on the part of the student. The other is, their value to the student as regards his direct aims and purposes in life. We cannot in colleges and universities do what was formerly done in England—take the student and whip him. ”

“ If you wanted to go still further and be a benefactor to the college at large, you endowed a competitive scholarship and set two or more pallid students working themselves to death to get it.
The real thing for the student is the life and environment that surrounds him. All that he really learns he learns, in a sense, by the active operation of his own intellect and not as the passive recipient of lectures. And for this active operation what he really needs most is the continued and intimate contact with his fellows. Students must live together and eat together, talk and smoke together. ”

“ Again, if the students and the college in general with a fuller measure of academic freedom and an increased sense of their social responsibility would reconsider the curriculum and methods of instruction in the light of democratic principles, many wholesome changes could be brought about. ”

“ When physical, economic, and social sciences were born they gradually demanded a place in the educational system from top to bottom of the line. The study disciplines they introduced, at first by apology of the cultured, and later by open response to a social demand for leadership in a vastly wider range of activity than was known when colleges first came to be, have attained a higher and higher position until now the various degrees which aim to differentiate the type of social usefulness for which the student is prepared are for the most part on a par with each other. ”

“ The culture instilled by the public school passes through the gates of the university as something ready and entire, and with its own particular claims: it demands, it gives laws, it sits in judgment. ”

“ It is impossible, without going into the details of class work, to indicate fully the intimate, subjective value to character of the quiet presentation of social facts. We are enlisting the interest, the thought, the sympathy and ultimately the activity of the students in the cause of social progress and public welfare. That the students recognize and cordially respond to the changing tone of college instruction many gratifying signs indicate. ”

“ So much for the four great necessities of average student life—in order of acknowledged importance: athletics, social life, politics, study. Deans and other official but theoretical folk128 will tell our Martian that the business of college is study and that all the undergraduate’s other functions are marginal matters; but their own conduct will already have betrayed them to him, for he will not have missed the fact that most of their labour is devoted to making study as dignified and popular as the students have made sports and clubs and elections. ”

“ During the past half-century the school has been transformed, in the principal world nations, from a disciplinary institution where drill in mastering the rudiments of knowledge was given, into an instrument of democracy calculated to train young people for living, for useful service in the office and shop and home, and to prepare them for intelligent participation in the increasingly complex social and political and industrial life of a modern world. ”

“ Nor is this the only reform which is needed in the education of our youth. The phrase 'completing one's education' is used to-day with utter looseness, and applied to that period when the youth leaves the school or college for the busy walks of life. ”

“ For the university past or present has but its foundations in the school, with its local and its general tradition, whatever may be the accordance of these with well-ascertained fact, its true novitiate can only be afforded in the cloister of reflection and research, of interpretation and synthesis; while for its full development it needs the perpetual renewal of that generous social life—that inspiring intercourse "of picked adolescents and picked senescents"—which has marked the vital periods of every university worthy of the name. ”

“ Happy times, when youths are clever and cultured enough to teach themselves how to walk! Unsurpassable public schools, which succeed in implanting independence in the place of the dependence, discipline, subordination, and obedience implanted by former generations that thought it their duty to drive away all the bumptiousness of independence! Do you clearly see, my good friends, why I, from the standpoint of culture, regard the present type of university as a mere appendage to the public school? ”

“ It may be urged that all these institutions are doing good work in education; and that many young men are thus taught who could not afford to go to a true college or university. But I do not object to the education—though I have no doubt an investigation would disclose equal absurdities here—for it is aside from my object. But I do object to lowering the ideals of the youth of the country. Let them know that they are attending a school, and not a university; and let them know that above them comes the college, and above that the university. ”

“ A boy or girl of eighteen, who has had a good school education, is capable of doing useful work. If he or she is to be exempted for a further period of three or four years, the community has a right to expect that the time will be profitably employed. But before deciding who is to go to the university, we must have some view as to the function of the university in the life of the community. ”

“ What the University Can Do.—An increasing number of young people from the country are going to college. The college was founded on the principle of educating American youth in a higher culture than local elementary schools could provide. It is the function of the college and the university to open wider vistas for the individual mind than is otherwise possible, to do on an infinitely larger scale what the teacher is attempting in the elementary grades. These higher schools are passing through a humanizing process; they are making more of the social sciences and the art of living well ”

“ The ingenuous youth, who attend the universities of the republic to pursue their studies, are free from this dangerous and disagreeable service, and therefore many enter themselves as students with no other view than that they may enjoy this privilege. This class of students I am inclined to believe is more numerous than that of the youth who attend the university according to the spirit of the institution. ”

“ That education will be the best, will be the most truly educational, which leads to the college, even though it find the doors closed.
I have expressed the hope that a deeper realization of the dignity of human life will make the ripe culture of the college more increasingly imperative for every child, and I believe that this result will come about with the growth of the social conscience, and with the increase of that spirit of brotherhood which is even now appearing as a bit of leaven in our midst. ”

“ The only answer necessary is the evident improvement in the general standards of all student organizations and the mere fact that they have, for the most part, continued to exist through several student generations; no little accomplishment in itself, when one remembers the almost automatic rise and fall of these societies in the early days. ”