tion from the schools. The colleges, by their requirements, do exercise a certain control over the curriculum of the schools. It is an open question whether this control is generally beneficial to the education of the young men of the country. If the colleges have prescribed courses of study, and if the schools have to follow a prescribed course of study leading up to it, then a few gentlemen with strong prejudices and limited experience of life obtain power to set up a canon of what things may be taught and learned in the country. That such a power has been possessed and used, that it still remains to a great extent unbroken, and that it is purely mischievous, I take to be facts beyond contradiction. In no civilized country is mandarinism in education so strong as in the United States. Its stronghold is in the colleges, and they use such control as they possess to establish it in the schools. One great gain of the reform which is now needed in the colleges would be that they would confine themselves to their own functions and leave the academies and high-schools to follow their own legitimate development.
I ought not to speak as if there had been no improvement in American colleges within a generation. It is well known that, both by founding new institutions and reforming old ones, great improvements have been made. A great college has a life of its own. It grows by its own vital powers and pushes on even the most timid or reactionary of its personnel. Probably bigotry and stupidity could kill it in time. One knows of ancient seats of learning which have met that fate. But it does not come all at once. Still, I believe that if the question whether the college course had been valuable, had been raised in a class of graduates twenty or fifty years ago, more would have said that they looked back upon it as a grand advantage than would say so now.
