"Americans are 'an extraordinarily mechanical people' in education as in everything else," says President Lowell of Harvard. "We go through life touching the button called and then conclude we have an education."

His method for combating the easy elective pick-a-pipe-course tendency of modern students is to require them to take enough work in any one subject so that they will really know something about it when they get through. Thereby he hopes to din into undergraduate minds the notion that they get an education by learning, not merely by acquiring so many credits; as the Harvard head puts it, "not only to offer dishes but to make the student eat out of them".

Too much is being said at present about the value of odds and ends. It seems to be a general impression that a student can take a slight dab or economics, a dash of sociology, a salting of rhetoric and literature, a minute sprinkling of precious stones, creative listening, fine arts, and what not, and a very medium dose of languages, and come out quite the University concoction. Glimpses and vistas, not real understanding, are being recommended for the "broad" college course. The student is getting the merest taste of the elementals of everything, and dropping the threads where they begin. His thinking comes to a halt where it ought to be starting.

The university, if it means anything, stands for more than a mere whetting of the intellectual appetite. Higher education denotes a real and positive training in thinking, and a genuine, hard-acquired understanding of fundamentals--an understanding that is applicable to the realities we are going to meet and the discussions we shall in future have a part in. The half-baked, touch-only-the-high-spots brand of "learning" now being "taken" by a good share of college students ought to be made a curricular impossibility. --Michigan Daily.