PERCEIVES NEW DISTINCTIONS

This transition, I feel, threw a very large and many cornered monkey wrench into the curricular machinery. I began to perceive the difference between men who knew their subject and men who were educated as I understood that term. I began to feel that there was a lot more in college than acquiring skills in intellectual fields or even prominence in extra-curricular activity. I began to hope for insight and vision and breadth of thought, for tolerance, and judgment and ability not in one field chosen with adolescent fancy, but in all fields so that I might choose the best. The vision of great deeds and great causes lost their youthful place in a chimerical mountain top, and their attainment seemed open to the man with perseverance. My fear of great things just because they were great vanished. In some intangible way I guess I grew up.

This is my issue with the college curriculum of today: it did not seem to grow up with me. It did not seem to cooperate with me to the extent that I think it might have done. Without this year as a Senior Fellow, I do not believe that this realization would have come to me until after college, or at least would have been considerably delayed. I am not at all sure that I am glad, although any approach to a firm consideration of values, I suppose can never be actually deplored.

Resolved into practicalities this is the result. I have followed too narrow a course. I feel like a man who has learned his part in a play without reading the whole script. Gerald Chittenden in "Reflections of a Resident Expatriate" comments on the men who tend to "open doors" for the student:

"Technique may be learned from books or pedants, but the relation of technique to the general progress of man and to the peculiar life of a nation can be discovered only by a man whose mind has been plowed like a field instead of being filled like a bottle."