Advertisement

Review of Current Illustrated

Under the caption of "The Harvard Daily Truth--A Vision," Mr. von Kaltenborn pictures a great newspaper run and operated by the University, partly as an example of what a great university ought to be, and partly as a great school of practical journalism. It is a well-written plea for what the author is pleased to call a new movement in education. There is undoubtedly a movement toward making all instruction objective and practical. Mr. von Kaltenborn's plan looks in that direction. There is also a movement toward restricting a school or a college to those parts of any subject which a school or college can teach. Mr. von Kaltenborn's plan does not look in that direction. The suggestion that the University should run a great newspaper in order to show the world how to do it is an interesting one and would have to be considered apart from the question of its use as a school of journalism. A model church, a model theatre, a model factory, and a model farm, perhaps also a model town, are a few other possibilities which might be considered in the same connection.

A most interesting and eye-opening article on "The Wireless at Harvard," by R. A. Morton, shows what some of our students have been doing in definite, scientific work, entirely on their own initiative. This article gives one of the most encouraging glimpses of student life which we have seen for a long time, and does credit to the writer and to those whose enterprise furnished the material for such a description. Undoubtedly the position formerly held by classical studies and literature is now coming to be held by the political and social sciences in all our American universities. The "new humanities," as these studies are coming to be called, concern themselves, as did the old humanities with the strivings of the human spirit, but with its strivings after justice rather than beauty. That Harvard students are awake to these interests, as well as to the problems of physical science, and are doing self-organized work in this direc- tion, is shown by an article on "Socialism at Harvard," by W. Lippmann. It would, of course, be more commendable if this interest would show itself in some more rational form than socialist propaganda, but even zeal without knowledge may be better than no zeal at all. Like all zealots, the socialists magnify their cause out of all proportion to its real significance, and imagine that it alone represents a serious interest in problems of human welfare. The poem on "The Bread Line" by L. G. Painter helps to point a moral on the subject of socialism. It presents a crude but sympathetic picture of one phase of our social life

Advertisement
Advertisement