PRESIDENT CHARLES FRANKLIN THWING

Western Reserve University and Adelbert College, Principal Speaker at the San Joaquin Valley Teachers' Association; Fresno, Cal., and the California Teachers'

Extracts from Administrative and Scholastic Problems of the Twentieth Century.*

BY PRESIDENT CHARLES FRANKLIN THWING.

The century now closing has made rich contributions to the science and the art of the higher and the lower education, as it has to the art and the science of every form of human endeavor. It has enlarged the property of the colleges of America from a very small sum to more than quarter a billion of dollars. It has increased the annual budget for public education until it amounts to two hundred millions. It has extended and enriched the course of study, and has also diversified it to fit the needs of the individual student from the age of six to the age of twenty-six. It has uplifted, dignified, and humanized the whole system of education, primary, secondary, collegiate, graduate, and professional. These results are fixed, and for them gratitude is common and hearty.

The century now closing is turning over to the century that is beginning questions which are as significant and as essential as the questions which already have been settled. The new questions grow out of the past, and they relate to the future. They are questions at once administrative and scholastic, new and old. Such, be it said, is the progress of humanity. Every problem solved is the origin of other problems to be solved. In this method lies the hope of the race. When men have no questions to ask, not only has the lip become paralyzed, but the brain has become atrophied.

Of the many questions which the nineteenth century transmits to the twentieth, several seem to me of significant value.

The first of these questions relates to uniting in the studies and the methods of the higher education the principle of unity and the principle of individuality. The college has developed in the last third of the nineteenth century the principle of individuality. It has developed this principle largely through the elective system of studies. It has allowed, if not commanded, the individual student to select those studies which he thinks are best fitted for his own peculiar needs. It has recognized that no two men are alike

*From "College Administration," by Charles F. Thwing, published by the Century Company, New York.

any more than two leaves of the same tree are alike, as Leibnitz pointed out long ago. It is affirmed that this unlikeness is best and most adequately ministered unto through different subjects of thought and of learning. It has seen that what is one student's meat may be another student's poison, or, if not poison, it may be to the other student sawdust; and what is to one student poison or sawdust may be to another student meat and drink. The college has not failed to recognize that what is food to a student in one period of his career may not be food to him at all in the other periods of his career. All this and much more has been worked out and put on the shelves of our intellectual storehouse.

But the colleges have made but small use of the opposite principle, which is also one of the great results of the century, namely, the principle of unity.- a principle which is not more true in the realm of nature than in the realm of mind. Man is ever the same man. The soul is ever the same soul. The mind that asks manifold questions in youth is the same mind that asks its less manifold, but hardly less important, questions of nature and humanity in its maturity. If every man is unlike every other man, it is also true that he is always unlike every other man; he maintains his personal identity. As matter is the same matter under many forms, so man is the same man under all the changes through which he passes and which work their works in and on him.

acter.

Both the principle of unity and the principle of individuality have their special advantages and limitations. The principle of unity tends to become sameness, monotonous. It lacks picturesqueness, as applied to human charIt exemplifies the prairie in human life. It stands for one wide and far-reaching level of uniformity. Man is the same man, noble, noble; mean, mean; great, always great; and small, always small. One knows where to find him who embodies this principle; one forecasts what answer he will give to every question; one anticipates what opinions he will hold under certain conditions; and one can measure his convictions of the next week by his convictions of the last.

But this principle of unity also possesses for one's self and for humanity at large many and fine advantages. Man is like the mountains, not like the weathercock which shows which way the wind blows. He is like the eternal hills, which determine which way the wind shall blow. He is firm and fixed. He represents the conservative element of human society. There is nothing uncertain or wavering about him. He knows what he knows; he believes what he believes; and he needs no one to convince him of his convictions. He is typed in the force of gravitation--an element at once fixed and not fixed, which moves through all things and guides them by unalterable laws. The principle of individuality, also, is beset by corresponding advantages and disadvantages. It gives variety to life. It is the mother of interest. It is both the cause and the result of development. It stands for life; and life is never in general, but life is always in particular, and life is always full of fascination. It represents the progress of being, which is always in and through individuals. But individuality, be it said, tends to become eccentricity. If it grows into the graciousness of righteousness and

goodness and into the superlative excellence of beauty, it also grows into wickedness and into the pessimistic degradation of sin and of ugliness.

In education, as in all life and nature, these two principles of unity and individuality are to be joined. The ocean is the same ocean, although the same tides never sweep over its beaches. The sun is the same sun, although not two risings or settings are identical. The world is the same world, although no two springtimes are alike in their sweet fragrance or in their mighty and silent growths. In the higher education the two principles are

to be joined. The nineteenth century has given us the principle of individuality; the twentieth century is to associate this principle with the principle of unity as the nineteenth has not associated it. We are to learn that the boy is father to the man, and that the man is the son of the boy. We are to draw a straight line from the primary school to the professional. We are to strive to make character more consistent without making it less interesting, more solid without making it less picturesque, more conservative without causing it to become less progressive, more fixed without causing it to lose adaptiveness. The man we take off the commencement platform we desire to be the same man whom, as a boy four years before, we sent to college; only we wish him to be finer, nobler, greater.

The union of unity and individuality as applied to the curriculum and to the student's use of the curriculum will tend to do away with that bane of our educational system, a haphazardness in the choice of studies. This union will give directness in aim; and directness in aim will contribute to force in execution and administration; and force thus used will add to consistency and general worthiness. The studies of the freshman year will be chosen in the light of the needs of the senior year; and both years will derive their purpose from what the man desires to know, to do, and to be after his college This union will not simply give us studies which a man may make into a backbone, as it is usually called, -for a backbone implies also other bones running at right angles to the chief one,—but this union will give us a whole system of studies, articulated each to all and all to each, and all going to make up a consistent and vigorous personality, filled with one spirit, guided by one purpose, moved with one will, and living one life.

career.

The twentieth century will also give us aid in determining the law of diminishing and increasing returns in studies. What this law is we have begun to learn from experimentation. We have learned that a language, be it ancient or modern, dead or alive, may continue to grow in its power over the student until he is possessed of the spirit of its literature, and of the people out of whom it grew and whom it in turn helped to create. The first three or four years in the study of Latin or Greek are the least profitable. The fifth and sixth years are, and should be, the most valuable. In the first period the study of a language is good; and it is good chiefly as a training in the important element of discrimination; and it is worthy of studying even if one pursues it no longer or further. But when one has become in a degree the master of a language, as, for instance, of the Latin, he is prepared to become a sympathetic student of these people themselves, to know what they were, to understand the institutions in which their life was