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Show Can the Two Factions in Education, the Cultural and Practical, Be Harmonized? RICHARD BURTON, University of Minnesota. I SEE three things operating against the welfare of a rightly conceived con-ceived organic science of popular education. The three are : the fevered chase of the "practical'' in education, resulting in no less than a revolution within the generation between 1SS5 and the present time; the abuse of the so-called democratic ideal; and, as a direct consequence con-sequence of these two in union, the failure honestly and clearly to see and say that two distinct types of training, the scholarly and the practical, are being commonly lumped together. It is high time to ask if a college is a machine from which any and every kind of information should be handed out as you turn the crank, or has it for its object intellectual attainment and the pursuit of learning for its own sake ? To make the inquiry is not to say that both aims are not legitimate, nor is it to forfeit a claim to sound Americanism. It is simply to ask that we clarify our muddy thinking, and substitute a clear perception of what we are about for a mush of vague conceptions. Logic demands that we acknowledge that hordes of people in a country coun-try like this need all sorts of practical training, and that institutions providing it, and so labeled, should be furnished them, leaving to real colleges (thus clarified by the proper drainage), the business of taking care of those who want truly collegiate work, and are capable of doing it. In the perfervid desire to give everybody anything he wants, or thinks he wants, in pseudo-education, we have fallen into the danger of giving least to the few intellectual aristocrats who refuse to be standardized standard-ized and find most difficulty in fitting into the scheme. Here, subtly pervading the whole conception of education, is the asinine assumption equally egregious in education and in politics that all are equal in brains, if only they are given equal chances. The truth is that in education, politics, life at large, brains are exceptional. Making education universal, and all but coercing people to go to college, does not In the least alter that primary fact. It is the business of democracies to remove all artificial and unnecessary bars to personal welfare and progress, prog-ress, but not the bar of nature. "What a blessing if our colleges had the backbone to say to inquiring youth, 'Almost anybody can go to college, but this doesn't mean that everybody every-body should.' How wonderful if some college, by inheritance the beneficiary bene-ficiary and guardian of the sound academic ideal, should speak right out and say that its aim was aristocratic; to prepare the saving remnant to rule the rest of us ! But what courage it would take in what we call democratic demo-cratic America I" |