History of the Ohio State university Volume 3 - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 edition. Excerpt: ...to discipline the mind and impart a certain degree of culture cannot be gainsaid; but except in the case of those who entered the so-called "learned professions," the results obtained were often more largely decorative than practical. Writing upon this subject fifty years from the time he was in college, one of the most highly educated scholars of his generation (although he would have been the last to admit it) said that his Alma Mater (Harvard College), "in so far as it educated at all, was a mild and liberal school which sent young men into the world with all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they needed to make useful ones. Leaders of men, it never tried to make. Its ideals were altogether different It did little, and that little, ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile. The graduate had few strong prejudices. He knew little, but his mind remained supple, ready to receive knowledge The entire work of the four years could easily have been put into any four months in after life." Of this same period and system, Agassiz, whose lectures upon the Glacial Period and paleontology, Henry Adams declared to be the only thing in the entire course of instruction that appealed to his imagination, said, "Harvard was only a respectable high school, where they taught the dregs of education." Since the announcement by Ezra Cornell of his purpose "to found an institution where any person could find instruction in any study," the uniformity and narrowness of this form of instruction, under the progressive and scholarly leadership of Charles W. Eliot, James B. Angell, and Andrew D. White, has been largely supplanted by the system, which, in common with the highest institutions of learning, we...