Whose the Fault

Year
1900
Month
12
Day
1
Article Title
Whose the Fault
Author
----
Page Number
4
Article Type
Language
Article Contents
WHOSE THE FAULT One of the strangest facts in human experience is the failure of the college honor man in after life. The fact that the brightest and cleverest student, who in competition with his class-mates in college carries off the honors and wins the praise and often admiration of his professors, will most likely in his subsequent career outside college walls be unequal to the competition of inferior men has so far been recognized that now-a-days more is expected in subsequent actual life from the dunce of the class than from its leader. There would appear to be something contradictory about this fact, but it is a fact nevertheless. Are we to infer from it that there is something wrong in our whole system of modern college education, which places a premium on feats of memory in recitation and fails to develop the perceptive and comparative powers of the student? Is it because students are compelled to cram so much of their authors that they have no leisure to digest and assimilate what they learn, and thus are brought under the tyranny of other minds to the deep and lasting injury of their own originality and powers of mental creation? Why is it that the brightest students at college when they descend into the arena of life are lacking in forcefulness, in energy, in powers of adequate perception? Why is it that, side by side with the man who never saw the inside of a college, they fail and he succeeds? We might go on asking an indefinite number of questions, all illustrating the short -comings of the college man in practical life, but we should be as far as ever from supplying the proper answer ! It is very easy to reply that. If he fails, his lack of success is due to his want of common sense. He is too idealistic, he lives in the clouds, in the upper regions of imagination; he has been so accustomed to the airs of Academe, to the atmosphere of books and to the debilitating influences of pedantry with its one-sided standards, that he possesses only passive faculties and actually has to unlearn much that was once presented to him as of incomparable value, and in its race to snatch at a more (illegible) comprehension of life. Of course, if he has the means to spend his life in the delightful pursuit of knowledge without though of the morrow, he can’t afford to despise the sordid views of life which are shared in by his fellow-men engaged in the actualities of common existence, and live and live a life in keeping with his ideals. But even then he will quite frequently be found to be impracticable, ideal, theoretical, unable to gauge the world as it is, selfish, and useless from the standpoint of individual responsibility for the betterment of society. Apart from religion, the object of education should be, especially in a civilization of practical ideals such as ours in this country is and perforce must be, to prepare the young for a successful battle in life. It is an age of competition, and the man who would be successful must to the necessary amount of theoretical knowledge add a still wider acquaintance with the practical workings of the machinery of human society. He must be practical first and keep the ideal as a sort of subconsciousness. In other words he must be endowed with good common sense. Common sense, in turn, is the result of a proper balance of faculties, perceptive and comparative, with a good strong staging of personal experience or of general experience to sustain it. Our colleges do not encourage the development of hard-headed practical sense in their students because they put a premium upon vanity, conceit and the over-estimation of useless arbitrary standards. College examinations are no real test of a man's ability to succeed in the world except in so far as they may indicate the man who will fail in life. It may be advanced in rebuttal of this assertion that they are not taken to be a test of anything but his knowledge of the subject which he is examined. That, is technically true and would be admissable if there were no undue exaggeration of the value of these theoretical standards, or if there were conjoined with the inducement to excel in subjective acquirements a proper admonitory restraint of the native impulses of the student. Studies should always be measured and administered on the basis of their true bearing on after life. It is because our colleges do not meet the actual needs of life that so many of these college honor-men are helpless in the real world, so crotchety and theoretical, so ill-accoutred for the tournay and the list through which they must pass before their worth is established and recognized. It is not so much nowadays what a man may remember, or even what he may know, as it is a question of what he can use to practical advantage. We know, for instance, of a physician here in Canada, a double- first and honor-men of several medical universities, who is so theoretical that he would not prescribe for quinsy or lance a boil without consulting the “authorities." His hair will be gray before he will be able to tell why he is a failure. We know of other college men, a lawyers, who cannot defend a simple drunk in a police court without going back to Adam and Eve and pleading hereditary provocation. We know of another case, a young man formerly a pet and boast with his professors, who is a burden on his family because he cannot decide into what channel or vocation of life he should throw his mighty powers of intellect. He has now been trying for several years to decide this momentous issue and his father is still clothing and feeding him. Assuredly there is something wrong something out of gear, some essential lack of adaptation to modem needs in which the colleges give, without exception-