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Show Superficial Training M THE DONS who preside over Oxford univer- H sity report that the American students c ! arriving there are not well grounded in H their studies; that they are not thorough, that H they have skimmed over too many things and H have been drilled too superficially in a few. We ' jfl H ' suspect that is true. Wo believe that is a fault H in a thousand American schools. H We believe that in the United States many H students graduate and receive degrees every H year, who are lamentably ignoiant of many things H which they ought to understand before they ever H enter, college. H For instance, how many graduates, even, H would fail if given a reading test? How many H could read the Declaration of Independence and H bring out its force? How many could read H Byron's "Battle of Waterloo" and give its proper H emphasis in places? How many could bound half kH the states of the Union in a way to show that H they know where they are located? How many H could give anything like a clear synopsis of the history of the United States? It is said that it Hi is a humiliation to intelligent foreigners to find H how little our "educated" tourists abroad know of H their own country. H Our colleges are not to blame. They have to H live, and are obliged every year to give hundreds H of students diplomas annually, whom they know H are not real scholars; that their seeming educa H Uon is a veneer that the friction of a few years H will rub off. But the schools are to blame when H they force upon students so many studies that K they have not the capacity to thoroughly absorb H them. Better let a student read and digest the H Bible, Shakespeare, Bacon, Macauley and Emer- H son, than to skim all the classics from Homer to H Beveridge and know nothing thoroughly. |