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To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

The editorial in the Harvard CRIMSON of October 14, headed "It's Clever but is it Art?" serves admirably to point the article in the Saturday Evening Post which it criticises. If the writer really believes that familiarity with so significant an event as the Treaty of Utrecht indicates "a pedantic hankering after specific facts" and that the date of so significant a landmark in the history of English literature as the appearance of Tottel's Miscellany is to be considered deadwood. I feel sure he is in a fair way of becoming the type of college graduate (not limited to Harvard) to which I took objection. I doubt if either a trend of thought or a vision will wholly save him.

I prefer to think, however, that he was merely unfortunate in his choice of illustrations for of course his point is clear enough. Pedantry is not the criterion of education.

Yet it is not safe to assume, this much admitted, that a certain amount of learning is incompatible with education. The facts of the past are quite as important as the facts of the present and it is difficult to understand how even a clever undergraduate can use, this material if he insists upon speedily forgetting it as soon as he has successfully "ploughed through a course".

There is no need of forgetting. I am even inclined to believe that any student who has honestly cultivated "the capacity to use facts and see their relations" will find it impossible to forget the facts themselves. Too often this selective process upon which the writer lays such stress is automatic and signifies only careless work. I refer, by way of contrast, to the English university graduate who does not forget and yet does not find his vision stunted. A recent CRIMSON editorial described vividly one such man "who closed his desk at the War office at four and at six was delivering a lecture on aesthetics at Oxford." A classic example is Mathew Arnold, scholar and gentleman, seer and publicist.

It is possible to secure an education outside of college. It is even possible to secure an education in college. But neither without nor within college can an education be secured without the accumulation of a goodly store of facts. Among these I should especially commend to the attention of those who expect to conduct the world's affairs for the coming generation a rather specific and intimate knowledge of the treaties of Utrecht and of Paris. The Old Dog