The president of Harvard tells us that the engineering student "labors without a groan on mathematics, which most college undergraduates shun like a pestilence," and most curiously he holds that the engineering student gets no culture from his mathematics, while the college student does, and must by force be exposed to the pestilence he shuns unless he chooses philosophy as the milder disease. If culture is "a little knowledge of everything" and "those things which ordinarily educated men around a dinner table are expected to know"—to quote again—it has little more real significance than the white shirts and black coats of these gentlemen. But surely the intangible trait that we should like to strengthen by our education is almost the reverse of this—something that makes the white shirts and gossip of the dinner table insignificant, seen at times in primitive peoples, in seafaring and farming folk, in hereditary nobles, in scholars—a certain detachment from the here and now and the narrower self, the quality of greatness in a man. This is almost unconcerned with any kind of information, but to a limited degree comes from mastery in one's own field, from historical perspective, from appreciation of the forces of nature.
There are three things that the university would do—represented by the college, the professional schools and the graduate faculty. Through the college it would give men broader interests and wider sympathies, through the professional schools it would teach the routine methods of practise, through the graduate faculty it would improve these methods and enlarge our knowledge. But while the partial separation of these three objects in the university has a historical explanation, it has no real justification. Every child and every man should unite continuously in his education and in his life what the university artificially separates—he should always be doing and learning to do his share of the world's work, he should try continuously to improve the methods of doing it, and he should learn to appreciate the work of others.
In our actual courses we can not do much more than teach efficient methods of routine work. The student can learn to do something in particular, not things in general. Hence our professional schools are on the whole more successful than our colleges or our graduate faculties. Routine research and routine scholarship can be taught in the graduate faculty, which is at present essentially a professional school for university teachers. For original research and productive scholarship we must wait for the man, or possibly search for him, give him a chance and let him alone. But we should welcome him and give him opportunity in whatever department of the university he may be found. The right way to give a man interests that are broad and permanent is not to put him in elementary courses in all sorts of subjects, but to encourage him to learn to do well his work in life and to connect with this by natural associations the larger world in which he may live.
