The following article on the Rollins plan of education was written especially for the Crimson by Hamilton Holt, President of Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.

Humorously, though at the same time mournfully, Woodrow Wilson used to quote the professor who declared, after long acquaintance with undergraduates at an ancient and particularly famous university, "The human mind possesses infinite resources for resisting the introduction of knowledge."

That had been Mr. Wilson's observation also, and he once remarked, "I have spent the greater part of my life doing what is called teaching, but many of the pupils of most of our universities systematically resist being taught. If I had anything that I thought was worth their hearing I should love to address a body of people hungry to learn. I have never done it yet. It would be a very novel experience."

Perhaps eventually one or another of our ambitious new psychiatric foundations--the Institute for Child Guidance, conceivably--will look into this and report that what ails the rebellious student (less at Harvard than at many other universities) resembles only too closely what ails the majority of us. That complex! Inferiority!

In his tenderest freshmanhood it develops, nor ought we to affect surprise. Almost everything about the usual university works toward making him feel small; instead of seeing an establishment got up for him and ingratiatingly placed at his disposal, it appears rather to delight in minimizing his importance--with the natural result. Dwindling in his own eyes, he reasserts himself, though that is at first a bit difficult. He cannot subtract one cubit from the stature of those collegiate halls whose very size and costliness and grandeur overawe and humiliate him. He cannot lighten by so much as an ounce the pressure of undergraduate opinion, which, finding him not only insignificant but at numerous points objectionable, sets out to work him over into conformity with standard design. But the professors, who have somehow an air of owning the institution and owning him--those, at least, he can defy.

Sometimes with blandishments, sometimes with academic Baumes Law, academic Jones Laws, and the like, the universities keep multiplying their mainly futile attempts to dissolve or break down his resistance. At Rollins College we abolish the motive for it. This we accomplish by prohibiting recitations, prohibiting lectures, and to a large extent making the professors the servants, rather than the masters, of the students. Though a fine sense of bigness results from defying a master, what possible exhilaration is there in defying a servant?

Radical Measures

These are radical measures--especially the measure that prohibits recitations. But--frankly, seriously--why is a recitation? Why indeed? If anything is to be taught, the student should question the teacher, not the teacher the student. The time when the student needs a teacher is not after he has got or failed to get his lesson but when he is studying.

Besides, the recitation is too commonly a rather farcial affair, and, as a recent writer puts it, Rollins College has "wanted to get away from the method under which the class room becomes a sort of criminal court, where the teacher--as judge, prosecutor, and detective--attempts to find out, often unsuccessfully, whether or not the student has mastered his lesson, and the student is mainly interested in creating a good impression, by bluffing or otherwise." More than any other single factor, the recitation is responsible for the definition, Student: one who does not study.

A Difficult Task

In point of stupidity, the usual college lecture ranks next to the recitation. Lecturers are rare, particularly among lecturers, just as teachers are rare particularly among teachers. To staff a college with teachers who can teach is difficult enough. To staff a college with teachers who can teach by lecturing is all but downright impossible. If you have a number of such teachers at Harvard, how many institutions share Harvard's good fortune?

I am not alone in my disgust with the usual college lecture. A veteran educator suggests that no professor be allowed to lecture until he has proved that he can bill a town, pack a hall, and satisfy people who have paid good money to hear him hold forth. A student at a famous Mid-Western university describes the lecture system as "that process by which the contents of the professor's notebook are transferred by means of the fountain pen to the student's notebook without passing through the mind of either," and recently Mr. H.G. Wells declared. "There is no need whatever for any one ever to suffer or inflict an ordinary course of lectures again."

The Journalists' Method

I suppose that my low opinion of the recitation system and the lecture system is a result chiefly of my experience with them both in my student days, but the impression then made was reinforced later on by my experience as a journalist, and a journalist is a student, habitually out for information. He will hunt for it in every other conceivable place rather than beg admittance to the room where that very information is being recited by students or where that very information is being dispensed by possibly the ablest of college lecturers. The journalist will dig in his own "morgue", his own library, make luncheon appointments with fellows rated as authorities, exploit the Reader's Guide, perhaps take a trip to see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears, and, if he runs to the professor in the end, it will not be to sit out a recitation or lecture, it will be to pump him, principally to check up on material previously gathered or to obtain a shrewder, more matured and balanced interpretation of it.

The journalist's method, I found, was a better one, educationally, than the traditional college method. The undergraduate quickly forgets. The journalist remembers. The things that he has learned by going out after them on his own become a permanent possession.