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WISCONSIN LITERARY ,MAGAZINE
cemeteries may vary, the road rules are practi-
cally the same for all; very seldom will the move-
ment of the cortege have any tendency to recall
the swiftness of mortality.
The curriculum is admittedly adapted to the
supposed abilities of the large majority of its
students, that is to say, to all but the hopelessly
indolent and the incurably dull. If the propor-
tion of students dropped on account of scholastic
deficiency increases perceptibly, alarm is taken
at once, and the standard hastily lowered another
notch. Only in a few of the endowed institutions
is any endeavour made to maintain a fixed stand-
ard of scholarship, irrespective of the percentage
of students that fails to attain it. A state insti-
tution cannot escape its political character; it must
cater to the tax-payers,-must "give the people
what they want." And what they want, in the
way of higher education, is a place where the
sufficiently opulent, and who are neither half-
witted nor totally inert, can spend four years at
college in perfect safety and complete peace of
mind.
Taking for granted that the annual welcome
sees a large number of sheep admitted to the fold,
it will not be difficult to ascertain the stimulatory
effect upon them of the college curriculum. The-
oretically, in maintaining its fixed rate of pro-
gression, the university not only holds back the
more intelligent but spurs and stimulates the lag-
gards. Actually it but partially succeeds in the
former, and fails egregiously in the latter. Those
whose faculties still languish in sloth at the time
of their matriculation, who have been vainly
prodded in grade school, and unavailingly
spurred in high school, are not likely to respond
to any stimulus which can be offered by the curri-
culum of a college. They have already tried the
pursuit of scholarship and found it wanting; they
have tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge,
and found it sour.
The university, in its liberal courses, offers little
that is entirely new to its incoming students; it
simply gives advanced instruction in subjects
which, in a more elementary form, are familiar to
all high school graduates. Unless the student has
already found his stimulus in algebra, calculus has
little chance of arousing his interest; if he has
been indifferent to Virgil, Lucretius will not in-
spire him.
It is true that a new and practically unknown
field is opened before the professional student,
often resulting in an appreciable stimulation. One
whom a smattering of French has left cold may
be intensely aroused by Shop Drawing, Genetics,
or Common Law Pleading. This, I suppose, is
what is generally referred to as the stimulus of
the college curriculum;-the inspiring vision of
new vistas of knowledge and thought which
should challenge the eager interest of the student,
the prospect from Mount Nebo, the showing as
from a high mountain of the intellectual king-
doms of the earth, productive of that exaltation
expressed in the well known lines of Keats:
"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
It is a curious and somewhat disheartening
circumstance that this feeling, in so far as it is
aroused by the college curriculum, should be so
largely confined to students who are learning to
design boilers or to breed hogs. Educators who
have recognized the greater zeal and intensity
with which vocational attainments are pursued
have been inclined to ascribe this exceptional
ardor to materialistic inclinations rather than to
curricular stimulus. But unquestionably a field
which arouses the curiosity of the jaded student,
which has the illusory greenness of distance, is
more likely to afford him stimulation than a mere
extension of the bounds of his accustomed mead-
ow, the pasturage of which he has found not to
his taste. If knowledge of Homer is to produce
on a student the effect which it did upon Keats,
it will have done so long before arrival in college;
he is by then, in respect to Homer, either already
stimulated or immune. And the same may be
said regarding the liberal curriculum as a whole.
Turning from the sheep to the goats, let us con-
sider the case of those who have found a stimulus,
an incentive to learn, in the course of their pre-
university education. These few, surely, the col-
lege curriculum will at least suffer to remain in a
state of stimulation, presenting to them an m-
spiring and constantly clearer view of the intel-
lectual regions which they have already glimpsed
with some degree of eagerness.
Even to this end the curriculum is poorly
adapted in several respects. In the first place,
there is the funereal pace of the average class,
which is as intolerable to one who is really inter-
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