Education: Ferguson

Last week was janitors' week in U. S. colleges and universities. Thousands of patient men in blue denim swept lecture rooms, fitted new light bulbs in corridors and stairways, received letters about stu- dents' furniture. It was also football coaches' week. They looked over their "material," started U. S. education on its first important step of the new year by giving setting-up exercises, passing and kicking practice. It was also professors' week. They returned from their vacations, tidied their desks and notes, made up class rolls, speculated upon the youths soon to be submitted them for intellectual advancement. Some professors, some parents thus speculating read "Ferguson—Rex" by an anonymous contributor in the Atlantic Monthly for September. Ferguson is an undergraduate "leader," the college "man of the hour." The portrait is not without truth but is perhaps too surely executed. The contributor called himself " '90" and erred, admittedly, on the side of optimism and generosity where others of his age had erred in pessimism and bitterness. Still, Ferguson was a fair inkling. Said '"90": "His [Ferguson's] attitude toward his teachers and studies baffles a dull observer, but in the main it is governed by his predominating intellectual trait. He admires manhood vastly more than scholarship. He has yet to learn the important place pure scholarship holds in the general plan of things. He is sure to learn this in time. If he finds in the scholar the man he is looking for, the scholar can lead him anywhere. But the tremendous forces that have made Ferguson what he is have left him where he refuses to see the scholar if the man is not there. It is said that he will learn nothing. No candid observer could claim that the outward signs of mental accretion are overwhelming, but in private conversation Ferguson displays at times a disconcerting clearness of vision, and a wealth of real understanding about a lot of things that he regards as important. . . . "One great need ... is a good 'contact man'—someone who can interpret the college to Ferguson and Ferguson to the college. He must be a rare man, but he can be found. . . ."

Other parents, other professors read How About the College? by Edward W. Bok (self-educated) in the Saturday Evening Post for Sept. 13. Said Mr. Bok: " 'Is a college education preferable?' Of course the simplest answer here is that anything calculated for our good is more desirable in its presence than in its absence. Unfortunately, however, this does not answer the question. ... I like the story told of the young Polish girl in a New York school who was asked to write the dif- ference between an educated man and an intelligent man, and who summed it up thus: 'An educated man gets his thinks from someone else; an intelligent man works his own thinks.' "