For Adults

While some of our intellectuals have contented themselves with classifying and ridiculing "morons," "yokels," "boobs" and "babbitts," others have devoted constructive mental energy to solving the ineluctable problem of the country's cultural amelioration. One such is Dr. Frederick Keppel of Manhattan, onetime Columbia University dean, onetime third assistant secretary of war, onetime foreign chief for the Red Cross, onetime U. S. Commissioner in the International Chamber of Commerce, latterly (since 1923) president of the Carnegie Corporation.

In the current Yale Review, the leading article, "Education for Adults," comes from his pen. It makes notable sense.

With no idea of heralding or exhorting the millennium, he calls attention to the status and aims of a body of adults, five times as numerous as all registered U. S. college students, engaged more or less formally in educational study. He analyzes this body:

A million and a half in 350 commercial correspondence schools. The type: predominantly male, aged 26, with two years of high schooling, living in a town of less than 100,000, in a state with "superior educational spirit," like Iowa.

Over a million in night schools. The type: male and female, aged 19 1/2%. Only 15% left school for financial reasons, having simply "lost interest," having returned to study because convinced by experience that "education pays." In Milwaukee and Portland, Ore., 6% of the population goes to night school. The national proportion is 51 1/2%. Some 150,000 in university extension courses.* The type: a woman teacher aged 30, studying Romance languages, English, mathematics, history. California and North Carolina are her habitat.

Some 100,000 in Y. M. C. A. courses; 130,000 in workers' classes under other nonacademic auspices; an incalculable number benefiting by government agencies (especially in agriculture), by museum and concert courses, by Chautauquas, lyceums and libraries;/- an incalculable number indeterminately benefiting from visual education (cinema) and journalistic (newspapers and magazines intelligently read).

But all this vigorous, various study is neglected, undirected, by the leaders of formal higher education. Founded in 1900, conferring annually since, the Association of American Colleges has touched but once upon adult education; in 1910 a paper was read on university extension courses--but the discussion drifted into academic bookkeeping (credits for study) and away from community service.

Adult education in the U. S. has been chiefly bread-and-buttery. And "if our friendly critics from other lands and other types of civilization are right (and whether they are right or wrong they are at any rate unanimous), we as a people are very much better at earning a living than we are at living."

If it has not been bread-and-buttery, our adult education has been "pointed"--that is, missionary. Not that adult education should avoid controversial subjects; but it is not at its best when effecting even "Americanization."

A cool opponent of laissez faire methods, Dr. Keppel concludes with calm insistence that he is not talking high theory; furnishes proven examples of "consecutive study for its own sake" that adults might be more generally engaged in: a course at Bryn Mawr College for working girls; the Williamstown Institute; certain mountain schools in the South; a Danish folk school in Pennsylvania; Commonwealth College (for workers) at Mena, Ark.; a foremen's course in an industrial town: a study group of business executives; reading and business executives; reading and discussion groups at Amherst College; the projected education of enlisted men in the Army.

Researches At Harvard

Recent exhaustive researches by Dr. John C. Phillips of Wenham, Mass., have incontrovertibly shown the decline of the Harvard birthrate. The research, on Harvard alone, is currently published in the Harvard Graduates' Magazine. It is not unlikely that the figures are representative of the trend of vital statistics in other higher-educated groups in the U. S. Dr. Phillips studied the reproductive activity of the Harvard classes of 1891-1900. The married graduates of this decade had produced but 2.33 children apiece. More alarming, the proportion of childless marriages had risen progressively from 15% in 1851-60 to 25% in 1891-1900.

No explanations were offered. Dr. Phillips did not investigate the possible causes--increasing sophistication, increasing mating sterility, increasing frequency of divorce. He did not analyze the effect of Harvard's latter-day blood transfusions, beyond noting that, while the class of 1850 was 100% American, 1900 was but 81% racially English-speaking, 1925 but 59%; and that the superior fertility of the new immigrant stock doubtless concealed an even greater falling off in English-speaking reproductivity.

He simply faced the fact--"The small family has come to stay"-and queried the future: "Will the task ahead be easier because of our ethnic complexity and a corresponding dilution of our more homogeneous elements, or shall we be confronted with unheard-of problems that will test the optimism of the most hopeful?"

Roads Scholars

Last week, with spring imminent and travel growing daily more pleasant, the Hobo College of Chicago drew its sessions to a close, held graduating exercises. Of an alleged 20,000 students enrolled in the past year, some 150 "sons of the road" filed to the rostrum for mimeographed diplomas witnessing the fact that they had taken courses in a curriculum limited chiefly to liberal subjects like public speaking, art appreciation, musicales, readings of literature. There were a baccalaureate address and "a class song rendered in the quaint idiom of the freight car."

Of this event the Harvard Crimson (undergraduate daily) took editorial notice with cutting Brahman irony: "After a winter spent in Chicago and enlivened by intellectual restlessness, the happy tramp heeds the call of the broad highway--his acquaintance with the humanities having given him that detached, impassive view of life so indispensable to members of his profession."

The New York World, which makes a practice of publishing thoughtful editorials:

"The hobo is far from being the comic figure he is often thought to be. In the first place, as we are often reminded, he is not to be confused with a tramp: he rides on freight trains, true enough, and often panhandles a meal; but he expects to work for a living; is, in fact, a migratory laborer. In the second place, although many of us do not realize it, he is an almost indispensable unit in the economic structure of the country. He is the gentleman who picks our oranges, lemons and grapefruit in Florida and California; who, a little later, picks our peaches in Georgia and the South Atlantic States; who, a little later still, picks our strawberries in Maryland, and who, still later, spreads all over the country, winding up perhaps at < "In short, without him we would not eat. Yet we treat him very badly. We. organize our commerce so that he has no other way of making a living and we cannot get along without him; then on slightest provocation we clap him into jail; we pass laws against him when he joins the I. W. W., and finally, to cap it all off, we make fun of him. We are ever ungrateful to those who serve us, but it would seem that we could find a better way to treat him. Perhaps we should contribute something to the endowment of his college."

Philosophers

Every once in a while, at no regular interval, the world's philosophers--that is, its academic, its orthodox, not its whirling dervish, ivory tower or bucolic sawbuck philosophers--appoint a meeting place, and hold an International Congress of Philosophy. The last (fifth) Congress was in Naples in 1919. The one before that was in Paris, and indeed the Congress has never been held outside of Europe.

Last week Harvard University announced some of its plans for entertaining such a Congress called for September in Cambridge, Mass. The invitations have gone out; 200 philosophers are expected. From Europe will probably come Rector Lapie of the University of Paris and Rector Del Vecchio of the University of Rome; Professors Giovanni Gentile (ethics) of Italy; Etienne Gilson of the Sorbonne and Levy Bruhl of the French Institute; William D. Ross, J. A. Smith and Ferdinand C. Schiller of Oxford; John Burnet of St. Andrews. From the various philosophical departments of U. S. universities and colleges: Professor Guy A. Tawney of Cincinnati, President of the western branch of the American Philosophical Society; President John G. Hibben of Princeton; Professors Alexander Meiklejohn of Wisconsin, Edward S. Ames of Chicago, Ernest Albee of Cornell, Jared S. Moore of Western Reserve, Dickinson S. Miller of Smith, Rufus M. Jones of Haverford, Ourant Drake of Vassar, G. W. Cunningham of Texas, John Drew of Columbia and Will Durant of the Labor Temple School, Manhattan (whose extensive work, The Story of Philosophy, will shortly be published), and their equals.

The formal host of the Congress is the American Philosophical Society, of which Professor William Ernest Hocking of Harvard is eastern president. The organizing committee has been placed under the direction of that omnifacturing pragmatic idealist, President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia. Quartered in Harvard's freshman dormitories, the philosophers will discourse by day and sleep by night on questions of the hour in metaphysics (the science of being), logic (the science of reasoning), ethics (the science of ideal human character), and the history of philosophy.

100% 100%

"The most remarkable piece of news issued from this office since 1923," was what Superintendent William McAndrew had to say last week of a report that every single solitary seventh and eighth grade pupil in 145 Chicago public schools had scored 100% in standard arithmetic tests devised and set them by City Supervisor of Instructional Research E. E. Keener. The stupid, the average, the brilliant--all had written perfect answers. No indication of the calibre of the Keener tests reached public prints, save that they were in "the simple operations of mathematics." Even so, many an educator appreciated how "remarkable" it would be to find any considerable portion of nascent society universally aware of the fact that two and two make four.

Town and Gown

At Bennington, Vt., Rev. Vincent Ravi-Both announced that residents and members of the summer colony had pledged $635,000 toward founding a new women's college at Old Bennington, that a tentative curriculum would be formulated by Mistress Myra Kelly of Bryn Mawr School (Bryn Mawr, Pa.) after a year's investigation oi U. S. colleges.

*The Universities of Chicago and Wisconsin are highly developed in this respect. Last week, newspapers carried the story of Convict Walter McDaniels, jailed in Wisconsin's state penitentiary for a hold-up in 1920. His education having been neglected, McDaniels took Wisconsin University extension courses in arithmetic, algebra, engineering mathematics, electricity. In May he is due to leave prison a qualified electrical engineer and able inventor. /- The American Library Association lately instituted a series of booklets called "Reading with a Purpose," on pertinent topics of the day. Some titles and authors: Our Children by M. V. O'Shea; Religion in Everyday Life by Wilfred T. Grenfell; Philosophy by Alexander Meiklejohn; Biology by Vernon Kellogg; Psychology and Its Use by Everett Dean Martin.