Litchfield enquirer., 1879-02-13
COLLEGE EDUCATION.
THE PRESENT SYSTEM ENDORSED.

in the discussion on the college question, and ask space for a word also, before the debate closes It is well to transfer subject of such importance from the narrow arena of a Village Lyceum to the wider field of public argument afforded by an able and independent Journal count it fortunate that Litchfeld County fur nishes weekly newspaper always ready to discuss any live question of the day, and al- ways frank and honest enough to give all sides hearing You seem to believe heartily in the good old rule, ''audi alteram 7oartem," and to practice on it.
 Now, in your reply to your Washington correspond ent a." and in your original arti- cle no less, you show certain misconceptions on the subject, of grave consequence, and which very seriously invalidate your reasoning and conclusions.
 You are mistaken, for one thing, in suppes- ing that ''the great bulk of eur se-called Amer ican Colleges, "-aside from Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Cornell, Michigan, and other of the larger and better endowed universities still adhere to the older education" If you mean by ''older education" the obsolete course of say thirty years ago, the dry-as-dust curriculum of two or three generations gone, then you are egregiously in error. There is scarce one of those less known colleges. certainly in the Northern states, that has not felt the tide of influence fer years from Harvard and Yale, from Williams and Dartmouth. Ann Arbor and Cornell, in favor of broad, liberal, and eminently practical course of study, such as the age demands. As for the Southern colleges to which you refer, they never amounted to much any way, and go for nothing in the ar gument. But such institutions as Marietta, Beloit, Ripon, Carlton, Iowa, Grinnen, and Madison University, are fair examples ot the representative colleges of the West. With four of the presidents of these colleges I am personally acquainted, and know them to be among the most truly advanced thinkers of the time, and their colleges wide awake and progressive in an ever broadening course of the thorough instruction in whatever is most men preparing for the active duties of life. And the other ''so-called colleges" are, accor- ding to their means, rapidly swinging into line.
 Again, emphatically deny your assumption that, generally speaking, instruction in our colleges is wanting in direct and practical val ue for the needs of the present age. What does this busy, boiling, rushing age need Men of of If men of broader mental training than can be got by smattering of French or German, or plunge bath now and then in the Sciences As your correspondent has spoken for liar yard, can speak for Yale. At present only two years the Freshman and Sop homore, are cept as these may fftrsapd mathematics, ex- tionals Experience has conclusive1y shown that severe training in the best Greek and Lat in authors, combined with the higher Mathe- matics, is the best possible preparation for the modern languages and the sciences as we'll as for the other studies of the Junior and Sen for years In the mental drill, the cutivating of the analytical faculty, the strengthening of the memory, the invigoration of the power of attention, to say nothing of familiarizing the mind at it's most receptive period with the grandest models of literary excellence the world has ever seen-no combination, and every substitute has been tired, has been found it's equal. And are we to be told that the Classics are not practical" when it IS abso- lutely undeniable that the highest culture of the age is very largely built upon that founda- tion, and that very many of the foremost sci entists, as we'll as most successful business and professional men, distinctly attribute much of their success to thelr early toll in these same oft-berated Greek Latin studies? The leading minds of our times and of those just past, the most eminent men of the age are college men, and in tough struggles with Latin ana Greek Mathematics; with Logic, and His tory, and Mental Philosophy; with Metaphys- lcs, and Rhetoric, and Political Economy and lastly, with the overwhelming range of the sciences, they have gained their power, and often and publicly have confessed it. Bis marck, Gladstone, Beaoonsfield. Thiers. Ga your, John Bright, Gortchakoff, among states men; Webster, Calhoun, Marshall, Story, Kent, our Secretary of State and foremost lawyer, Wm. M Evarts, among the great lights of the Bench and the Bar; of poets, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and Tennyson, ,and scores and hundreds at the head of their professions in every land, who know and admit their indebtedness to their academ- lc and collegiate training, give emphatic deni- al to the position that these studies are outworn and useless. Your own Litchfeld, Mir. Edi- tor, negatives by it's noble history your depre- citation of colleges. The strong men of that village in days gone by were college men. Judge Tapping Reeve was a graduate of Princeton. Judge Gould was a graduate of Yale. So was Dr. Lyman Beecher. Were these men not '.rractical?" and successful men And was not their college training of great advantage to, and an immense stimulus of, their career? And strongly suspect that, if the truth were told, the men of power in your borough to-day, and of the generation soon to pass off the stage, are, and have been, college men.
 
 a boy can do, is to do exactly what you deny-''devote three or four of the best years of his life to the eacquisition of Greek and Latin" He will get more real benefit from them in solid mental and available power, than from any other use of his time. Suppose that he does not remember much about his Demos themes or Homer in after life How much does he remember of his Algebra or Analyti- cal Geometry, or Differential Calculus, ten years after graduation? Or, how much sticks to his memory of the History, or the Physics, CT the Natural Sciences that he went oyer in | college? And yet was there no benefit to his mind from the hard grapple with, and mas tery of, the studies, requiring no easy effort to grasp them? The truth is, there is an inn mense fallacy-and it is high time it was fully exploded-a fallacy underlying all or much Of your reasoning, that training will follow |