Vassar, at Poughkeepsie, adds her tremendous prestige to the abolition of compulsory courses.

The trend is unmistakable.

Concentration upon what the student does best is found to be the higher road to scholarship. On certain subjects considered important, lectures are given, but the students are not marked in them.

More and more this condition should be carried into our public schools. Why should a child who excels in English, French and history, but who is a miserable failure in mathematics be forced to take advanced training in that subject? Or vice versa? Is it to make jobs for teachers? That cannot be, because there are the children to teach for a specified number of hours and it requires an almost fixed number of teachers to any given school population.

In a way, the tenacity with which the system almost everywhere holds to traditional compulsions is due to jobholders. It may be that one or two branches of study would suffer from greater election by pupils and their parents. But these jobs would be filled by persons engaged in teaching the more popular subjects.

When so great an institution as Vassar discards the last of its compulsory courses as it has done, public education should not lag. The trend towards excellence in the best skills and arts and sciences cannot be ignored. Boston Traveler.