The College and the New America
by Ph. D. New York and London: D. Appleton &Co. 1920. 8vo, xi+202 pp. $2.00.
PROFESSOR HUDSON contends that there must be a reconstruction of college education, and that it must be 4 motived’ — to use one of his favorite locutions — by a keener sense of the obligation of the colleges to the American social order. Analysis has been made the goal in higher education; the college man is taught to isolate scholarly interests from one another and from life and to dissect them; but he is not taught to see them reunited in their due relation to one another as they are in life. Higher education should have for its climax, not analysis, but synthesis.
The American social order stands for the realization of the individual through society and of society through the individual. For the upholding and upbuilding of it, the college should give its students moral training — not isolated from life, as moral education usually is. The entire college curriculum must be a moral training. It must not leave a student free to take subjects which he will drop forever at Commencement. It must define and strengthen desires that are worth while, and it must teach the sure means of their fulfillment. It must attempt to correct the shortcomings of American social sets: it must stimulate religious consciousness; it must foster international thinking.
With Professor Hudson’s conception of the true aim of higher education, which he expounds with a definiteness scarcely hinted at in the foregoing meagre outline, there will be little disagreement, even among college professors, to whom his book is primarily addressed. It is indeed the conception that has produced the various ferments in higher education during the last half-century. The introduction of the elective system and the revision of the elective system may be laid to an effort to meet the obligation to the social order. The failure of college education, so far as it may be said to have failed, is attributable to the natural limitations of the teachers and of the students. Although the curriculum changes almost automatically in accordance with the demands of the times, the limitations of human nature remain. What college professor, by taking thought of himself, can add a cubit to his stature? Which one can lift himself by his boot-straps? Such men as James and Shaler and Norton and Hopkins were able to impart to their teaching the inspiration that Professor Hudson finds lacking in the academic mind: they were able to do it because of a rich natural endowment.
Professor Hudson’s analysis of the academic mind is shrewd and incisive; his exposition of the American social order is instructive; his hortatory utterances are not without a tonic quality; but the remedy that he would administer to college education is a counsel of perfection.
A. S. P.