A third step has been taken this autumn by a vote of the Faculty providing that the courses elected by a student for concentration in History and Literature must be approved by the Committee on Degrees with Distinction in that field. This has always been true of candidates for distinction under this committee, and in fact the field is one that would present little unity if the courses chosen were unrelated. But that the combination of courses by other students should require approval is an innovation which shows that in a subject where the liberty of choice is peculiarly liable to abuse, the Faculty is prepared to require a consistent programme of study, with a view to giving students an education rational as a whole. Moreover, departments and committees, which do not wish to limit the choice of the students concentrating in their field to combinations of courses approved by them before-hand, sometimes take charge of his work in the subject and really oversee it at every stage. They do in fact act as his advisers, and can often do so better than the instructor specially appointed to advise him. The adviser so appointed frequently takes a very careful interest in the development of a man's work throughout his college course, and whenever a man shows on entering college any strong special interest. Professor Parker always tries to appoint for him as adviser who will sympathize with that interest. Nevertheless, the departments and committees which pay close attention to the choice of courses by each man concentrating in their field add much to the thoroughness of his education, and have adopted a principle that might with profit be more widely extended. It would be well if every department insisted on having a list, not merely of candidates for distinction, but of all students concentrating in its special field. APPLICANTS FOR ADMISSION TO FRESHMAN CLASS, APPLICANTS ADMITTED, AND NUMBER WHO ENTERED, 1906 TO 1915   Final Candidates  Admitted  Entered  % of Candidates Admitted  % of Candidates Entered 1906  808  576  559  71.2  69.1 1907  798  594  562  74.4  70.4 1908  688  529  486  76.8  70.6 1909  770  573  539  74.4  70.0 1910  786  565  528  744  67.1 1911  885  640  610  73.4  68.9 1912  869  645  599  74.2  68.9 1913  885  614  580  69.3  65.5 1914  936  685  664  73.1  70.9 1915  982  677  647  68.9  65.8

Orals Aid Real Education

Another departure from the practice of counting by courses is the requirement that every student shall be able to read ordinary French or German at sight, and show it by doing so orally. This has proved to be a very different thing from taking and passing a course. It is a test of capacity acquired, not of tasks performed. It is in this one subject a measure of the man and of his education, not a unit of credit accumulated. Not less important is the Committee on the Use of English by Students, appointed in consequence of a request from the Board of Overseers. The investigation by that body showed that students who had done their required English composition often could not or would not express themselves creditably in their later written work. A man who cannot write his mother tongue grammatically, lucidly, and with a reasonably fair style, or who does not think it worth while to do so, is not an educated man, no matter how many courses he may have scored, or how proficient he may be in a special field. In this connection it may be noted that the supervision of the use of English applies to the Graduate School as well as to the College.

All these changes are in a direction away from the mechanical view of education which is the bane of the American system. We see that view displayed every-where, prominently at the present day in efforts to raise the standard of pre-medical training. This is commonly expressed in terms of courses taken and credits obtained, not of knowledge acquired. If a young man has passed a course and learned little or nothing, or forgotten all he knew, he fulfills the requirement; but if he has mastered the subject in any other way, and can prove it by examination, it avails him nothing. Counting the credits scored in courses is, no doubt, the easiest way to apply a requirement, but it is not a sound system of education. What a man is, what knowledge he possesses, and what use he can make of it, is the real measure of his education. All persons who desire to improve the American system from the common school upward ought to strive not to lose sight of the end in the means, not to let the machinery divert attention from the product.

College Men Best Reserve Officers.

One cannot leave the subject of the College without considering a matter prominent in men's minds at the present day -- that of military training. Our colleges are obviously not military schools and cannot properly make themselves such. But it does not follow that they ought to treat preparation for national defense as a student activity with which they have no concern. The experience of the present war seems to have shown that in a country that has not universal compulsory service of some kind one of the most pressing needs in case of war is an ample supply of trained officers, and there is no better material for this purpose than the students in our colleges. Moreover, the aim of a country which desires to remain at peace, but must be ready to defend itself, should be to train a large body of junior officers who an look forward to no career in the army, and can have no wish for war, yet who will be able to take their places in the field when needed. The best way of reaching such a result, and the one least wasteful to the tax-payer and to the men themselves, is to give a sufficient training to college students who will thereafter be engaged in civil professions and business. If this is the duty of the state the colleges ought to promote it so far as they properly can.

Military authorities are of opinion that training enough to fit a man for a lieutenant's commission in case of war can be given in a portion of the summer vacations, supplemented by military instruction in term time. The summer vacations are now too often wasted, and one of the problems confronting American colleges is how that time can be better spent by students who are not obliged to use it to earn their way through college. In no other period of adult life does a man, who is not a drone, expect to spend between three and four months in recreation. Nothing has yet appeared so valuable for the student, or of greater service to the community, than five weeks at the summer military camps held for the last three years. Carried on as yet with very little expense to the government, they have been insufficient in equipment in the different arms and services with the use of which an officer should be familiar; but within their limited means they have been admirably conducted, and the progress of the students has been eminently satisfactory to the officers in charge.

Instruction in Term Time Wise

The question of military instruction in term time is more difficult. A popular impression still survives that drill, comprising the manual of arms and evolutions in small bodies, is the main point in military training. It is, of course, essential, but it forms a very minute part of the education of an officer; and it is quickly learned, as anyone who has visited the students' camps must have observed. Moreover, it had much better be taught under military conditions like those in a camp or in the militia, rather than in student organizations at a college which is not primarily a military school. Constant drill in a hall or on an athletic field is artificial, monotonous and wearisome, tending to produce an aversion for military training instead of an interest in the real problems with which an officer must deal. It would be wise, therefore, for our civilian colleges to leave drill entirely to the summer camps and the militia, and confine such military instruction as may be given in term time to those elements of an officer's duty which are appropriate to a college curriculum. There are many of these which are quite is well adapted for intellectual study as other subjects taught in college. Such are: military history, including the changes in tactics caused by the increased range and precision of weapons; the functions of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and aircraft modern war; the taking advantage of terrain in war, and the use of topographical maps; the construction of field defenses and the methods of attacking them; the mechanism of moving large begins of troops; mobilization, with the collection and distribution of supplies. All these things can be taught like other college subjects, by lectures, reading, discussion and laboratory work, the last, including problems with maps and, as in the case of Geology, field work in the neighboring country. A couple of courses on these subjects following a couple of summers at the camps should be enough to qualify a man of ordinary capacity to be enrolled as a subaltern in the reserve.

A plan of this kind requires cooperation between the colleges and the national military authorities. The government must maintain the camps on the necessity scale; supply the officers for instruction there, as well as for teachers -- though by no means the only teachers in the college courses. It must also frame a comprehensive plan of training which will be elastic enough to be adapted to the curriculum of the college; and it must give a recognition in the form of a list of reserve officers to men who have finished the training satisfactorily.

Summer Camps Essential

The colleges, on their part, must recognize the training in some way; for the courses of instruction in term time must clearly be under the supervision of the college authorities, and if they are to be of real value they must be treated as seriously as other courses. Whatever may be possible in those institutions which received under the Morrill Act grants of land on condition of maintaining military training, other colleges cannot now make such training compulsory for their students; nor, so long as military service in the country is voluntary, is it desirable that they should do so. But if military instruction is not required, the only academic recognition that can be given to it consists in treating it as a part of the elective work that may be taken for a degree. This involves a serious question, and one that may well provoke a difference of opinion. Courses in military science and the art of war, offered in term time and comprising no drill or physical training of any kind, are obviously fit to be included in the list of regular electives. If not, it is because they fail in their object of serious instruction in a subject requiring study and thought. But the camps are also a necessary part of the officer's training; and yet there are distinct objections to treating the work there, in large part physical in character, as equivalent to academic study. The fact that it involves effort, persistence and discipline is beside the mark. So do foot-ball, rowing, hunting, and many other kinds of sport, to say nothing of work which poor students do to support themselves both in term time and vacation, but these do not contribute directly to the education for which a degree is conferred. To treat drill in any form or to any extent as an elective substitute for Literature. History, Science, or Mathematics would seem to be proceeding on a false principle and introducing a dangerous precedent. We have always refused to entertain proposals that physical exercise should be treated in any way as an elective course; and one would hardly suggest it in the case of military drill were that not a service to the state which we are anxious to cultivate. But if we allow it to count on this ground, why should we not count also service in the united, in teaching school, in public charities of many kinds. In practice it will be found very hard to draw the line.

Army Men to Give Course

On the other hand the training received in the camps' or elsewhere is an essential basis for the courses in military defense which supplement it. If it must not of necessity precede them in time, it had better do so, and may well be treated as a needful preparation for those courses. Acting upon this principle, the Faculty has recently voted that a course in military science to be given by officers of the army during the second half of the current near may be counted for a degree, but only by students who have attended one of the five-week summer camps, or had sufficient training in the militia. The effect of this in encouraging undergraduates to attend the camps is much the same is it would be if the camp, coupled with academic instruction in term time, were created as the equivalent of a college course. The difference is merely one of form and yet the form is not unimportant. The precedent of counting anything involving a considerable amount of physical training is avoided; and with it possible difficulties in the future when the demand for military preparedness is less insistent and a demand for encouraging something else has arisen. In treating the camps as a required preliminary for profiting by the courses in military science, we are acting on a safe principle that involves no danger of being extended beyond the case to which it is applied.

A further development of courses in military science must depend very much upon the attitude of the War Department and also of the Navy, for the fleet in this respect is not less capable than the army of receiving valuable recruits from the student body. A modern battleship is a vast machine-shop, and electrical or mechanical engineers who have for a couple of summers spend five weeks a float in naval study and practice, could in case of war be made useful at once as junior officers, and relieve regular officers who will be badly needed for work elsewhere. Formerly, naval officers could be drawn in large numbers from the mercantile marine, but now there is no such source of supply, and it would seem wise to train a large number of reserve officers among our students, especially among those who are devoting themselves to engineering. There are, indeed, many special aptitudes that ought to be utilized in case of war, and could be used with little additional training if the plans were carefully prepared. Chemists, for example, could without much effort learn what would be needed to fit them for work in a government factory of ammunition if war broke out. A sudden mobilization would call for special qualifications of all kinds on a far larger scale than the regular army could furnish; men to assist in transportation of troops by land and sea; men to collect supplies, to forward them and to distribute them; surgeons and nurses to man hospitals; and so on through the whole range of military action. To recruit and organize such men in a hurry would be an almost impossible task, and would certainly entail perilous confusion. Officers for all these purposes ought to be enlisted beforehand, and receive so much instruction as is needed to fit them for that duties peculiar to military operations. They ought to be recruited young, and in this, as well as in giving the instruction required, the colleges and universities could be of very great assistance to the nation. Even when the present enthusiasm for preparedness has spent its force, it is probable that, without compulsion, many students will be ready to undertaken the training if adequate recognition is given by the military authorities and by the colleges. At Harvard we have long had a large number of undergraduates in the militia. This number ought not to be diminished. It ought to be possible, and during the last year it has been made less difficult, to combine service in the militia with attendance at the many camps.