How Free the Choice?

Things were simpler in Wheelock's day, when we are told that "Eleazar was the faculty, and the whole curriculum" was limited by stout oaken staves. It isn't so simple now, when the educational world has accustomed itself to regard required studies with suspicion and to look upon freedom of choice on the part of the student from the available bill of fare with a considerable favor. If one may judge by sporadic indications there has been a stout reaction against the idea, so often ex- pressed by the conservative, that the elec- tive system has been overdone and that it would be well, when the colleges return to something like normal peacetime condi- tions, to confine the student's power to choose his intellectual provender within narrower limits. It is not probable that any go so far as to demand the complete elimi- nation of the elective system and a forth- right return to the ancient theory whereby a college education meant the same curric- ulum for everybody; but at least there has been an increasing clamor for a reduction of the power to choose, at least to the extent of giving to the choice an appearance of consistency and purpose, and if this were not resisted by exponents of the free elective system it would be a modern miracle.

Evidently there is a case to be decided, not by one faction or another, but by all concerned combined, with a view to discovering just how far freedom of election is practically useful. That the average College Student has not the capacity to discriminate wisely, and that only the exceptional few can make good use of unrestricted freedom, is probably the prevailing opinion; but it still remains to ascertain where lie the limits beyond which complete freedom of selection is almost sure to be abused by the bulk of every student body, to its own hurt. Broadly speaking, college education in the liberal arts institu- tions aims to fit as many young Americans as possible for the fruitful use of life—for the difficult art of living together in a world where, one soon discovers, one must do a lot of things one doesn't like. Perhaps it would be well to require of the student more things he does not relish spontaneously while still in training for that world.