school. The High Brow attitude according to my definition has been swept away, for everything studied now is allied to life. I was told recently that in the history of Harvard University there had never been such an interest in the study of Livy as has been evinced by this year's Freshman Class. There are no full professors of Chemistry in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Every one of these men is serving the government. If the despised Latin has become real and living-what can be said for Mathematics? How many hundreds of boys in the past six months in the ordnance departments of our army, in aviation and radio schools have found for the first time perhaps the value of a knowledge of Mathematics. We have been "stabbed wide awake." The pathos comes from the fact that so many young men are patriotically giving up their chance of an education, just as they have caught their first vision as to what an education means and what it can do. Even in our preparatory schools enough French has been taught so that boys have been of service in France in teaching their less fortunate brethren in the American Army. I think most school masters will agree with me that the term just drawing to a close will be remembered as a term of unusual seriousness on the part of the boys-a term of unusual scholastic success because the work has seemed real. And the so called utilitarian studies have seemed no more real than the others. Just at present there can be no great quarrel on between the teachers of blacksmithing and sex hygiene on the one hand and Latin, Greek, and Mathematics on the other. This war has taught us to see values that some of us never knew existed before. We are face to face with realities! The past three years have taught us a number of things. We have become a little skeptical of the omniscience of some teachers; the so called business live wires of the Sunday Supplement have lost their glamor for us; for there are High Brows in the business world and even in the religious world; for the same awakening process has been going on in religion. A Y. M. C. A. worker in France recently told me of an English Chaplain who arrived at the Western front with a trunkful of sermons which he intended to preach to the men just out of the trenches. "Lock up your trunk," said the weary and exasperated worker, "and preach to the men the real things you learn in this life from day to day." "Here were men," says Donald

Hankey, speaking of the first British Army, "who believed absolutely in the Christian virtues of unselfishness, generosity, charity and humility without ever connecting them in their minds with Christ, and at the same time what they did associate with Christianity was just on a par with the formalism and smug righteousness which Christ spent his whole life in trying to destroy."

:We teachers are learning I believe our lesson too. We must learn it or we shall be swept aside, that in the world's trial, our profession must in time undergo its examination; whatever of formalism and smug self-righteousness, or high brow in that sense, must go, for our work is being revealed and we shall be judged worthy or incompetent as the next generation now in our charge, meets the world's realities.

Educational Problems in the Colleges

for Women

MARY E. WOOLLEY, PRESIDENT, MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE, SOUTH HADLEY, MASS.

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MONG the gods of old Rome was one particularly fascinating to me in my childhood because he achieved what seemed in those days the very remarkable feat of facing both ways at once. I have learned since then, by observation, that it is not always so difficult as it looks. But totally aside from the question of its difficulty is the question of the need of that facility in the educational world, with its multitude of opportunities.

I am assuming that in an audience like this we are agreed that there is a place for the college of liberal arts as distinguished from the vocational and technical school or college, an assumption impossible in some audiences which fail to see any use in an education not designed primarily for "direct application to immediate needs." Such an audience does not always think through its proposition and realize that it is manifestly impossible for many undergraduates to know their "immediate needs,”—that the logical result would be vocational smattering in many directions, at the price of sacrificing the trained mind, capable of "ranging new facts in their proper places."

Assuming general agreement as to the raison d'etre for the college of liberal arts, the problem becomes even then not altogether easy of solution. The curriculum of the liberal arts college has changed enormously within the last twenty-five years, even within the last ten. Entire new departments have been established, now so essential a part of the intellectual life of the college that the average undergraduate never dreams that they have not always existed. I was at Wellesley when experimental psychology was introduced and the psychological laboratory opened; when eco

nomics and sociology became a department separate from history; when Fraulein Wenckebach taught education as a course added to the department of German. When I came to Mt. Holyoke, there was no psychological laboratory; no separate department of economics and sociology; and an instructor in education had been appointed only a short time before. The experience of other colleges for women is similar, these courses only illustrating the way in which college curricula have been expanded within the last fifteen and twenty years.

This "drift" has been immensely accelerated by the times in which we live and no one can withstand it, if she would. It is essential to be in touch with things as they are. We must study the history that is making at such a tremendous pace-not only in the political world but also in the economic and industrial and social world. Within the last two or three days I have been reminded of the appeal which subjects directly in touch with modern conditions make, by the remark of one of our faculty, whose own work is in the line of the humanities, "Present sociological and economic problems seem so much more vital just now than studying the history of the past." The college Philosophy Club at its meeting last week discussed "the ethical aspects of present economic problems with one talk on "Enemy Aliens in our Country," raising the question "are we morally obliged to allow any one who wishes to have a share in our prosperity to enter this country," and another, a resumé of an article by Sidney Webb, entitled "The World Famine into which we are Hurrying." These "straws" indicate the direction in which the academic wind is blowing. An interesting sidelight on the present situation is a student editorial in the last issue of the Mount Holyoke News entitled "College and the World"-"Undoubtedly, now that the war has come, we are more inclined to take the universal view of life. Of course we still think of our studies, but there is an added purpose in our thoughts now; we study, consciously or unconsciously, with new vigor because of the work of reconstruction after the war, in which we must help When we are trying to balance the book of the world, to find something to pay for this colossal war, put on the credit side the universal view of life which has come to many people. To have connected college with the world

is no small thing for college girls." Most of us will agree that to have connected college with the world is no small thing for college girls, and are also grateful that in this process the students still think of their studies.

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The only objection which some would raise is that in so much thinking of today there is an implication that only the newer culture is of use, that the older has served its day. "Let the dead past bury its dead." A recent article on "The College in a Democracy" says of the college, "At its best, in the halcyon days, on its intellectual side it has approached more nearly the passionless home of academic culture and calm. A resting and ruminating place for the soul, between the actuality that was and the actuality that was to be." To many of us the article seems not to state the problem, that the danger is rather lest we have no resting and ruminating place for the soul; that in our interest in the actualities that are, we shall lose sight of the actualities that were. In other words, has the past no part in the effective living of the present? Is Frederic Harrison altogether wrong in his assumption— "If we are so deeply indebted and so indissolubly bound to preceding ages, if all our hopes of the future depend on a sound understanding of the past, we cannot fancy any knowledge more important than the knowledge of the way in which this civilization has been built up." It is not only that the culture of the past plays a part in the effective living of the present, in whatever sphere that life may be lived; it is also true that the present crisis places added responsibility upon colleges for women in line of work, directly and definitely allied with the past. I am indebted to President Lowell in his after-dinner speech at the Brown Celebration three years ago, for the thought of a challenge to the scholarship of America, when the battlefields of Europe are claiming their awful toll of the hundreds and thousands of her scholars of tomorrow. Who dares to predict what the future has in store for the possible scholars among the young women as well as among the young men of America?

And again, there is a gift from the past for the individual life, not alone for the life of the scholar, a gift indicated in Mr. Meiklejohn's expression,-"Learning at the helm of life"; in Mrs. Allinson's subject, "The Muses at the Hearth"; in the point of view of