784
JOURNAL OF
CHEMICAL EDUCATION
APRIL,
1929
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE The American college a t its best is sui generis. It has no counterpart in Europe. In its essential quality it is a growth of the soil and spirit of America, and not a replica of the English college. But to traditionallyminded mentors of education, the American college is an ugly duckling. They are puzzled a t its small likeness to the European institutions they believe to he its parents. In its awkward, unskilful immaturity, they do not see the growing swan. So they use power and prestige to transform it into a familiar duck. Failing in that, they turn the creature out to starve, and concentrate their attention upon more proper offspring. Not a great educational foundation in America today is concerning itself vit&llywith the genius and destiny of the American college as such, except for a few projects lasting over from former policies. . . . . In America our academic men have an intense feeling of inferiority to Europe. We have not the independent insight to realize that the indigenous institutions our critics hold in contempt are immature stages of growths of novel type and of splendid promise. The American college is not primarily the home of specialized scholarship where young men and women, having come substantially to an end of youthful development, undertake to pursue to the limit some special field of interest. I t is not primarily a professional school, where time and attention are centered on the mastery of a calling. It is not an institution of indoctrination, where some special views of life or religion or politics are impressed upon growing minds, and where the traditions of special peoples or cults are perpetuated. I t is not primarily an institution of instruction, where the daily lesson is a little more advanced than in the secondary school. It is not chiefly a finishing school, where the arts and graces of society are transmitted, and where one receives the authentic stamp of the cultivated man or woman.
VOL.6. No. 4
CHEMICAL DIGEST
785
It may include many of these elements, hut it is not circumscribed by any of them. The American college is an institution intuitively evolved by the American people, to provide opportunity for the enlarging of life. I t is an institution in which incompleteness and provincialism may be cast off, where interest and outlook may become universal, where a larger pattern of life may be set up for emulation. I t is a place where crudities may be refined, where discipline may be acquired, where every element of body, mind, character, and personality may be brought under the influenceof standards of excellence. I t is an extension through a longer time of the period of youth and growth. I t expresses the faith of the American people that life may be lived by a larger plan.-Antioch Notes
