But do you, parents, impose severe exactions on him that is to teach your boys: that he be perfect in the rules of grammar for each word-read all histories know all authors as well as his own finger ends; that if questioned at hazard, while on his way to the thermæ or the baths of Phoebus, he should be able to tell the name of Anchises' nurse and the name and native land of the stepmother of Anchemolus, tell offhand how many years Acestes lived, how many flagons of wine the Sicilian king gave to the Phrygians. Require of him that he mold their youthful morals as one models a face in wax. Require of him that he be the reverend father of the company and check every approach to immorality. "This," says the father, "be the object of your care; and when the year comes round again, receive for your pay as much gold as the people demand for the victorious charioteer."

-JUVENAL, Satire on the Estimate of the

Teacher.

VIII

BREEDING INTELLECTUAL AMBITION

ONE of the standing sources of distress to the college faculties of this country at the present moment is the immense chasm between the interest which the students manifest in athletics and that which they show in scholarly achievement. A freshman class which will easily raise a thousand dollars for its football team will let its debaters travel to a rival college town at their own expense and even when the debate is held in its own borders, attend it in very small numbers. Many thousands of college alumni will go long distances to see the annual football game between their colleges and their favorite rivals, who will not take the trouble to appear at Commencement time and who know absolutely nothing concerning the great educational interests of the college. People who are in hot haste to condemn the colleges should first examine the practices of the alumni. Those who are quick to visit wrath upon the college authorities for seeming to yield so much to the athletic tendencies and demands of the student body, should above all 165

things find out first what moves the vast body of parents in sending their sons to college. Even the most casual inquiry along this line will reveal the fact that most of the alumni have no scholarly tastes, no intellectual ambitions, properly to be described as such, and it should not be very strange that their children are lacking in the same direction. Indeed, it is a fair question to-day whether the majority of the vast and steadily increasing student body have strictly intellectual or educational purposes in entering college. Certainly the major activities of the student body and the distribution of their time, energy and force does not seem to indicate this to be the case.

And yet there was a time when all these young people were as susceptible to the appeal of the mind and the heroism of intellectual achievement as they later became to the glories of the athletic field. There was a time when all these interests were contending for the premier place in the youthful mind. The desire to excel, the willingness to be prominent, to be differentiated from the mass of other children and young people, is very strong in the youthful mind. What finally assumes the first place comes to that dignity by a perfectly natural route. No boy loves baseball

better than football except for reasons which

can readily be traced. No boy comes to college with a highly developed yearning to be a tennis champion or a champion shot-putter or a speedy quarter-miler without having had certain well-defined influences operate upon him to bring about this result. Where the child develops interest, the agencies which make for that interest have been at work and have allied themselves with the child's disposition to know and shine for something distinctive to itself. Ask any boy what he plans to be in after life, and as a rule, unless he has had his career clearly outlined for him by circumstances which dictate his future in an absolute way, he will respond in the line of his intensest interests, entirely oblivious of the absurdity or grotesqueness of his choice. Thus the son of a great brewing magnate a few years ago electrified his father, a worthy German who had pursued his profession of brewer with an eye single to making a good product, after the German fashion, and who thought only of seeing his son succeed him in his great enterprise, by announcing that he intended to become an evangelist! Inquiry developed the fact that he had had as a teacher a man who was a great admirer of Dwight L. Moody. He had so portrayed that man and his moral and spiritual influence over men to the brewer's son that he