The Helena independent. [volume] (Helena, Mont.) 1875-1943, 1891-07-22
PRACTICAL

PRACTICAL EDUCATION.
The educational harvest Of the yeal
has been reaped and the fresh product
of university education is eagerly await
ing a favorable turn in the market to
display the ripeness Of its scholarship
The young medico has had his sheep
skin wonderfully framed, and it stands
out in bold relief from the wall of the
downtown Office which he has furnished
with the assistance of contiding store
keepers. In the breast of John China
man, who calls for the doctors weekly
contribution to the wash-tub, it seems
to excite a world of respectful interest,
but the general public maintains an at
titude of CALLING indifference to the med
ical and surgical skill that has settled in
its midst and that only awaits an oppor-
tunity to set Berlin and Edinburgh
green with envy. While the future
Koch waits iinpatiently for the coming
rush of patients, he solaces himself by
carefully noting the growth of the
shadow on his upper lip and the syste-
matte elongation of that hirsute diploma
of age and capability. In lucid inter
walls, he wonders where in the world the
months rent is going to come from, and
varies the monotony of his idleness by
marveling at the gullibility of a public
that persists in %patronizing that old
fogy Blank, whose knowledge Of materia
medica is coeval with that of Galen, and
who is not even on bowling terms with
the science OF bacteriology. A budding
lawyer has hung out his single next
door, and when he is not playing poker
with the doctor he curses the ill-luck
that condemns a future occupant Of a
seat on the supreme bench of the United
States to the degradation of earning his
bread and butter by collections. The
embryo parson is filing the pulpits of
p%lethoric clergymen who are disporting
themselves in Europe, on the mountains
or at the coast. His opportunities rem
der him merciless. The mercury may
register ninety in the shade, but a mis-
taken sense of the duty he owes to hui
manity and that humanity certainly
owes to him leads him to ruin the di-
gestion Of the occupants Of the pews
with the choicest and longest of his di-
vinity school discourses. On his hearers
he lavishes all the wealth of his twenty
odd years of wide experince in a be-
nlghted and, sin-laden world, while he
never fails to illumine them with his
views of things in general from the Gre
alton to the day Of judgment.
Meanwhile the time-soured editor
~fastens his fangs with fresh delight on
the shrinking bodies of his latest
victims. In fact, it is not too much to
say that the immolation of the college
graduate is for the editorial writer one
of the great festivals of the year. He
marks it with red ink in his calendar,
and classes the opportunity with Wash
ington's birthday, the Fourth of July.
and other national celebrations. When
the tariff questions run dry, when
Robert Porter fails to make a pew break
in his census figures, whom Rudyards
cease from Kipling and the Haggards
are at rest, the unfortunate college
graduate is bound once more to the
horns Of the altar. He is eminently
impractical. He has wasted some of the
best years of his life in the pursuit of
knowledge that is Of no earthly use to
himself or the world at large. Compared
with the self-taught man, he is a dead.
weight, a nlncompoop. Neither he nor
his class has contributed a respectable
total of men to the great lights of COM
merce, politics or even literature. He
may be able to play ball and he has a
weakness for cigarettes, but the chief
end of, and only hope for, the college
graduate is to studiously forget what he
has deliberately learned.
Extremes are proverbially dangerous.
Much of the abuse that is leveled at the
college graduate and the system of
which he is the finished product is anti
quated, out Of date. 1t is not yielding
the field to admit that the invective
once had in it an important germ of
truth. There was a time when tradition,
like a clog, impeded the advance of Il
colleges and universities. A time-worn
system was in vogue hat pinned it's
faith to one hide bound curriculum and
attempted to turn out it's graduates
with the precision and the family re-
semblance of a pin making machine.
Books were everything. Practice was
nothing, But it is a most significant
fact in the later history of our %institu-
tions of learning that they have spared
no effort to keep in touch with the prac-
tical nature of the American people.
Chicago has given us a curriculum
which, followed out, might serve as a
memorial of national progress. The
LELAND Stanford, Jr., university, in Cali
f%ornia, proposes to work on similar lines.
And the advance is not confined to the
latest ventures. Conservative mstltu-
tions like Harvard and Princeton are
quick to follow the good example of
their younger competitors. Princeton,
for instance, supplements the teaching
of geology in the classroom by extended
practical instruction with pick and
hammer. 1t sounds like a truism that
geology, botany and similar studies ca a.
not be learned or taught ~exhaustively
in the classroom alone, but the attempt
used to be made. This summer, a num-
Der of Princeton students under sthe
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