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He has no imagination, they say. And this is right. He has had more facts than he has had problems – and those little things in the text are not problems.
Well, saith the professor with unction, then we have at last the perfect mind!
Not so. I am trying to say that a mountain of facts memorized is not education, never will be education and unless its practice is abandoned along with general examinations, we will continue to play havoc and will continue to drive our geniuses into the solitudes where they sometimes find happiness but where, more often, they blow out their brains.
This boy could have been made the equal of any high-ranking engineer or whatever on his graduation day simply by forgetting this foolish cram-cram-cram of facts, facts, facts without ever trying to correlate them.
How can that man’s channels ever develop, if all facts seem to be equal facts? Thus when he thinks about a cow, ten texts on biology, and six on industry and nine on animal husbandry instantly flood him and drown him.
And all the time, he merely wanted to know how to drive a cow.
Thus, the examination system is doubly bad. A man must memorize and swallow everything his books and teachers tell him without ever questioning any of it if he wishes to get a high mark. Let him question and he comes to half-a-dozen conclusions, one of which is an unhealthy one: the professor is a fool. But this is hard on professors because professors are not fools but highly trained men held down by a system arising from the public hue and cry that Mama and Papa want to know what Johnny is doing in school.
That is up to the professor and up to Johnny.
The general attitude of students toward professors is really terrible to contemplate, much less hear. All the bitterness of the fellows who are really intelligent goes straight at the professor who is, himself, only the victim of mass education.
A university professor must inherit all the errors. And a university professor deserves much better than that.
A worse system is at work than the university system, which in itself could be modified considerably if the basics become modified but which can do little until those basics are modified.
The YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association] schools over the country deserve much more credit than they get. They are small schools, true, but they are many. And young men have had their lives rehabilitated, not by any “Christianity,” but by the type of teacher that seems to gravitate to these schools. They start a youngster down at the bottom and yank him to the top so swiftly that he never quite realizes that he has to study. And he knows more when he gets through a YMCA school, all the way through high school, than he would have known had he gone through grade, high school and college in any other place I know about.
There is a reason for this which is a very strange reason and does not seem, at first glance, to make good sense. In reality it has been considered a slap at these YMCA schools and has kept some of them from getting their credit ratings with any speed.
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