113
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Title
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113
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Transcription
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None the less it is observable that the only striking disproportion in the enrollment is in the case of the wholly general and non-professional College of Arts and Sciences. The figures for that college, indeed, are somewhat deceptive, for the Teachers' College and some of the schools are organized within it and demand certain deductions from its totals. Still, after all deductions are made, the numbers enrolled there are greater than those of any other division of the University, and show a persistent vitality in this oldest of all the colleges.
The problem of the arts college is today the principal problem of higher education in America and especially in the state universities of the Middle West. The keying up of the economic life and the growing disrepute of leisure have tended to put a pressure upon the student to make every moment of his training count—in almost a Prussian degree— toward his efficiency in some demonstrably useful activity. Out of this shift of emphasis there has grown a corresponding vagueness as to the exact values for which the arts college is to stand. But however much technical training may become the chief function of the state university, it can not wholly displace the pursuit of those other studies whose aim is to inform the mind broadly in the thoughts and experience of the past, and put the present into its just perspective by widening the student's outlook. How vitally this purpose clings to the prevailing idea of education is to be seen in the enrollment in those courses that have no other reason for being. And the problem of the arts college lies in the proper correlation of those studies to that end.
To return to the general condition of the University, perhaps the best survey of the range of subjects of study offered by its colleges in its fiftieth year, and of the teaching done in them, may be had in a glance at the list of its separate departments and the numbers of students registered in them in a recent typical semester.
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Rights
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