"Essential Elements"

Worthy of contemplation by U. S. students who must this month decide what courses of study they shall undertake during the coming school year, were words of Sir Frederic G. Kenyon, written for a conservative London quarterly and relayed to the U. S. last week by the discerning Living Age.

Sir Frederic was speaking of the

Classics a subject upon which

he may entertain a slight bias, he being director and chief librarian of the British Museum, a onetime (1917-21) President of the British Academy, a member of numerous societies and academies devoted to classical culture, a scholar deeply steeped in Oxford tradition and repeatedly honored by universities from Athens to Ohio.

Besides high lauds for the exhaustive survey lately completed by the American Classical League (TIME, Oct. 6, July 13) upon the present condition of the Classics, Sir Frederic wrote the following:

"The contest between Science and the Classics is, it may be hoped, as dead as the contest between Science and Theology. No reasonable person in either camp doubts that both are essential elements in our civilization, that room must be found for both, and that boys and girls who have an aptitude for either must be given opportunities to develop in accordance with their abilities. . . The value of any element in education lies in its richness in ideas by which it strengthens and enlarges the mind. Science has such ideas in plenty; and History and Modern Languages; but none of these subjects has them more richly than the Classics. Their strength lies just in this width of range. They include much of the greatest poetry, philosophy, history, criticism that the world has produced, and Greek in particular is the supreme embodiment of the true spirit of Science, the resolve to question all things and see them as they really are."