From time the prediction has been made that the time was coming when universities and colleges would have to shut their doors to the men and women who care not for an education but for the joys and frivolities so often associated with a college education.
Alumni of Duke University last year received letter from that institution asking them to choose from the high schools those men and women who they thought would get the most out of an advanced course of education. In other words, the officials of Duke University wanted to get a line on all of the high school graduates but those who were likely to take advantage of opportunities offered them at college.
Washington and Lee comes out with the formal announcement that hereafter it will follow the policy of education by selection. It finds that much of its energy is being wasted under the old system which admitted everyone capable of paying, regardless of their intentions. The announcement reads:
“Washington and Lee, in this age of transition and moral bewilderment, recognizes that the intellectual training of college students is often subordinated to social and athletic aims and activities; that the ‘college man’ of today on the American campus looks on the ‘hard student’ striving with all his might for high grades as an unwise crank to be pitied rather than envied or imitated; and that the total failure of nearly one-half of the carefully picked and tested freshmen entering American higher institutions to obtain even the lowest passing marks,’ for a degree is not only amoral tragedy but also a lamentable educational failure.
To avoid overcrowding its teaching-force and laboratories and lowering the efficiency of its training by employing cheap and inexperienced instructors, the number of new men admitted is strictly limited to a predetermined number.
“The faculty, therefore, is at present exercising unusual care in selecting as matriculates only those young men who in addition to their intellectual preparation are in moral character, personal habits, and energetic industry specially desirable members of a self-governing student-body, and in detecting and rejecting all applicants, regardless of their ’units’ or high school diplomas, who are deficient in moral character, correct habits, or self-determined industry.”
There has to be a limit to the size of our educational institutions and the only way to really offer full advantages in the right way is to exclude the ordinary sort of student, one who cares not for an education but likes the frills that go with the life. The sooner the worthless student is exiled everywhere, the sooner will the universities and college men begin a bigger public service.
From the editorial page of the Brevard News, Sept. 18, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92074063/1926-09-16/ed-1/seq-4/
No comments:
Post a Comment