Those colleges which limit their enrolment "in order to give a few students a better training" must in the end sustain a very heavy burden of proof; they select the best students, they say, but they retain the same teachers, and one fancies the instruction will remain much as before. I know colleges which have carried the "limiting" fever into the classes, and boast that they have improved the quality of their teaching because this or that course, which used to be open to anyone who elected it, is new strictly limited to twenty or fifteen. Well, it depends. If the teacher is not a good one, it is better to limit the number of his students--that is, if you can't get rid of him altogether. Similarly, a college should be small if the instruction it imparts is not first rate. But if its faculty contains great teachers, it is a loss for the nation if its enrolment is not large.

Moreover, we forget that the selection of the best students justifies itself only when all the other students have been cared for according to their needs. You can raise up an aristocracy of culture, as a sort of flower of society, but it must flower out of society, not be separated from it. An artist like Poe or like Edward MacDowell seems tragic in his loneliness because so few of as countrymen had at the moment anything like the equipment for appreciating his genius. To develop isolated specimens of culture would be a silly ambition, even if it were possible. Of course each mind should have the training it needs, the best training it can take; the geniuses should have opportunities the others could make no use of. But the moment you try to give each the help he needs, you find your school or college dividing itself up into an "intellectual department store", as it should divide; and when you realize that all your teaching in the classroom is vain if it is contradicted by the spirit or atmosphere of the student's home, you feel bound to carry the opportunity of education into that home, and your school or college is embarked on adult education. So much the better. Thus will end the rubber stamp the stereotype ideal of training, which now lingers chiefly in certain small places where all the students take the same course and develop the same taste in dress.

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The teachers must aim higher. Of course we might make some changes in the small traditional colleges, to wake them up. I have often thought we might examine all the students at the end of the sophomore year, and those who proved their ignorance we could present with their A. B. diploma and send home. If one is doing nothing but accumulate college life two years will suffice to accumulate it all. The other students, who had learned something, we might keep on for the four years, and at the end we might give them too their A. B. diplomas. The difference between the two diplomas would be much as it is now. Or it might be a subtler kind of justice to give diplomas only to those who had learned nothing at college, so that no one should go away empty handed. This suggestion I like to make to my friends among the graduates of the proud small colleges, who fear that the larger places, grappling however clumsily with the problem of intellectual hunger, may become "degree factories". Yet the real cure is not in such devices of administration, but in the attitude of the teacher.

From "Mass Education" by John Erskine in September "Bookman."