Nearly all our colleges are avowedly or im pliedly Christian. A respectable minority of them are Roman Catholic. The large majority are under Protestant influences, which are sel dom denominational. The student is expected to attend certain religious exercises, such as morning prayers; but often all such attendance is voluntary. The religious life of the under graduates finds its expression in various socie ties, which endeavor to promote the Christian fellowship and life of their members. While moral and religious convictions are freer and sometimes taxer than of old, the Christian life in our colleges is real and pervasive.
As a rule the student is so absorbed by the scholastic, athletic and miscellaneous activities of his college that he sees little outside social life. This is particularly true in colleges which enjoy academic seclusion amid rural surround ings, for here more than anywhere else is to be seen the natural unperturbed outworking of the undergraduate spirit.
Development of Elective Courses.— The non-scholastic aspects of our present college life are important in that they give tone to the whole picture, but they do not account for the great transformation which has been wrought for that transformation is distinctly scholastic. It is caused by the increase of students, their better preparation and their greater age. The studies which made up the curriculum leading to the old bachelor of arts degree are now being completed before the end, sometimes by the middle of the college course. There is to day no reason why a young man of 20 should not know as much as his father knew at 410. But at 20 his father had graduated with the bachelor of arts degree, whereas at 20 the son is only half way through his college course. As this fact forced itself upon the older and stronger colleges, experiments were made in granting a limited amount of elective freedom to students in the latter part of their course; first in the senior year and then in the junior year, until in some instances the whole four year course became elective. In some a student may obtain the bachelor of arts de gree without studying any science, or he may omit his classics, or he may know nothing of philosophy. Today the problem of the rela tion of prescribed to elective studies is a ques tion of constant interest and perpetual readjust ment. The solutions offered are many.
The first proposal, which has now scarcely an advocate, is plainly an impossible one. It is to insist on the old-fashioned four-year pre scribed course. But the old-fashioned course cannot be restored, because it no longer suits our age. Young men will not go to college and remain there until the age of 22 years without some opportunity to exercise freedom of choice in their studies.
The second proposal is to constitute the undergraduate course entirely, or almost en tirely, of elective studies. It is argued that when a young man is 18 years of age, he is old enough to choose his liberal studies, and that his own choice will be better for him in dividually than any prescription the wisest col lege faculty may make. The advocates of this view admit its dangers. They see the perils of incoherency and discontinuity in the choice of studies. They see that many students are in fluenced, not by the intrinsic value of the studies, but by their liking for this or that instructor, or the companionship of certain students, or for the easiness of certain crowded courses. Yet they argue that the college stu dent must be free at some time, that his sense of responsibility will be developed the sooner he is compelled to choose for himself, and that he will have the stimulating and sobering consciousness that what he does is his own act and not the prescription of others for him Those who oppose this view argue that the academic freedom here proposed belongs to university rather than to college students; that the American freshman is not a university stu dent in the sense in which that term has been commonly understood in the educated world, because of his much shorter preparatory train ing, and his mental immaturity as compared with the English and Continental student. Ii, therefore, he is to be as well educated as they are, some of his time in college, the first two years should be spent in rounding out and en larging his properly secondary education before entering upon that elective freedom which has a place, and a large place, in our present under graduate courses.
A third proposal is a conservative modifica tion of the one just mentioned. It is to pre scribe groups of cognate studies with the ob ject of concentrating attention on related sub jects in that field which the student may prefer. The advantage claimed for this mode is that it allows the student to choose the field of study he likes, and then safeguards him against in coherency by requiring him to pursue a group of well-related courses in that field. The advo cates of wider freedom object to this as fet tering spontaneity of choice, as not recogniz ing the fact that there are many students for whom it is advantageous to choose a study here and there at will, as a piece of side work outside the chosen field of their activity. The objection to this plan of restricted groups and also to the plan of practically unrestricted freedom is that it offers temptations to pre mature specialization at the expense of broad intellectual training.