Not so long recently President Henry S. Pritchette of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching said that far too many people are going college these days. Dr. Arthur W. Bailey, Educational pastor of the Second Congregational church, Holyoke, Mass., declared at the recent session of the Religious Education Association that some people are not worth educating: their intelligence is too low.
So it seems that another inspirational ideal of our American life is to be rudely snatched away from our youth. The preamble to our Declaration of Independence has long since been discarded. Soon after, the fundamental clarion call to greatness was challenged—that every boy had it in his power to become President and every girl the wife of the President. Now we are calmly told that too many of our youth aspire to go to college and that a lot of us are not worth educating.
President Pritchett and Dr. Bailey would have all the boys and girls of the nation corralled and given the intelligence tests about which we hear so much today and certain persons designated as being of sufficient mental ability to be set aside for various callings and professions, the others to be consigned to mines and factories and the occupations requiring brawn rather than brain.
Un-American? Yes, and un-Christian. God is no respecter of persons. It is a pagan notion that condemns certain persons to servitude and others to lordship. Mind is not all that enters into achievement. Character, too, counts, and diligence of application and the spirit of co-operation and good fellowship. Success is essentially spiritual. Even boys adjudged to be dullards have started the world by their life achievements. Edison couldn’t learn books and Darwin was a hopeless blockhead, so his teachers said. So said they likewise of Wordsworth and of John Wesley and of many others.
A college is more than a mind factory, with certain machines in the form of professors and curricula, by which ignorance becomes knowledge, and from which a glorious success will eventuate. A college is a section of life. What a man is in college he will be in the work years of his career. If he will apply himself honestly to his duties, associate cleanly with his fellows, cultivate the spiritual virtues of the Christian way, keep himself well-rounded and sympathetic in his attitudes, whether he is a genius or dullard, college is the place for him. If his idea be to get by with a bluff, to do things slyly, he would blush for his mother to know, to live for self and not for the service of his fellows, to ignore God as the constant companion of his every experience and his supremely important helper, to neglect the incorporation in his daily life of those simple, yet essential virtues of the Christian pathway, then college is no place for him.
No man is too dull to be entitled to come to college with character of the Christian type as an asset of his life and with the ideals of the Christian way as his inspiration. Nor is any one brilliant enough to deserve to come without these spiritual endowments.
It goes without saying, in view of these considerations, that the aspiring youth should select his college with clear discernment as to its Christian atmosphere and spiritual ideals. What is its estimate of the value of character—Christian character?
Without Christian character higher education is an engine of destruction. Unless the world desires Kaiser Wilhelms and Verduns as the result of higher education, great concern must be had to see that colleges admit no young people who cannot pass the character test and that colleges should themselves be made seminaries of Christian character as well as laboratories of learned research.
Who should come to college, then?
All who aspire to serve with their life in the spirit of the Christian faith, all who conceive of leadership as willing service to God and brother-man. Christian colleges open wide their doors and hearts to every young man and young woman whose life is inspired by this gripping, uplifting idea.
Are YOU worthy to come to college? Yes, if you wish to be a Christian rather than a Hun, a servant of mankind and not a fiendish ghoul of selfish indulgence. Aspire to be a real man, a real woman, and so come to college.
From the front page of the Maroon and Gold, Elon College, N.C., June 15, 1923
No comments:
Post a Comment