We have just made our way through a college catalogue; and we are more than ever convinced that the only man who can safely be turned loose to educate himself in this wilderness of special courses, is the man who is already educated; and we mean this to apply not only to the formative side of education, but to the informative as well. In fact it seems to us that the great variety of special offerings, in combination with the elective system of selection among these offerings, has produced results which are particularly disastrous on the side of information.

When we speak here of informative education, we are not thinking of that special training which fits the student for some particular job; rather, we are assuming that the educated man should possess, over and above the lore of his calling, a general acquaintance with the history of mankind, with the scientific view of the universe, with the best in world-literature and the other arts, and with the major concepts of philosophy; and we submit that no youth left free to wander through the college catalogue is likely to compass the fundamentals in this broad field of knowledge. Indeed, it may as well be said that the thing can not be done; for what results can we expect from a system of special courses and free election which abandons to immature and undisciplined minds a labour that is almost beyond the strength of the strongest man of our time--the labour of selection and synthesis?

If it be both possible and desirable, as we assume it to be, that every collegian should be instructed in the essentials of history, science, art and philosophy, then there must be a deliberate stiffening of requirements, and at least an attempt at a selection and synthesis which will condense within the scope of these requirements a survey of the field of knowledge. The student who had accomplished such a survey would no longer be a stranger in great regions of the world of matter and spirit, as so many half-educated people are to-day; nor would be necessarily have missed the formative influence of the elective system and of intensive study in some special field. It is said that requirements kill initiative--that the survey method encourages superficiality; but we should favour the retention of the elective system in the domain of specialized studies, and the development of an even more intensive specialization of work is frankly special. The thing that we are quarrelling with is the regime of compromise which throws so much of the student's time into the region of half specialization that he is left in the end uninformed and undisciplined as well. The Freeman