student experiences; no
system helps him to find himself. An introductory course in philosophy
should begin with the problems of philosophy; it should have its
origin in the reflective and speculative problems of the student
himself. As the course progresses, the student should feel a growing
sense of power, an increasing ability to formulate more clearly, to
himself at least, the questions of religion and ethics that arise in
the life of a normal thinking person. So, too, courses in ethics and
psychology lose the vital touch unless they begin in the life of the
student and apply their lessons to his social and intellectual
environment.

It must be pointed out, however, that the social sciences lend
themselves more readily to this intimate treatment than do languages,
or the physical sciences, but at all points possible in the study of a
subject, the experience of the student must be introduced as a means
of giving the subject real meaning. In teaching composition and
rhetoric illustrations of the canons of good form need not be
restricted to the past. Current magazines and newspapers are not
devoid of effective illustrations. When the older literary forms are
used exclusively as models of language, the student ends his course
with the erroneous notion that contemporary writing is cheap and
sensational and devoid of artistic craftsmanship.

Courses in physics and chemistry frequently devote themselves to a
development of principles rather than to the applications of the
studies to every sphere of life. Introductory college courses in
zoology spend the year in the minutiae of the lowest animal forms and
rarely reach any animal higher in the scale than the crayfish. We
still find students in botany learning the various margins of leaves,
the system of venation, the scientific classifications, but at the end
of the course, unable to recognize ordinary leaves and just as blind
to nature as they were before. Zoology and botany do not always--as
they should--give a new view of life, a new attitude towards living
phenomena, a new contact with nature.

Careful inquiry among college students will reveal an amazing
ignorance of common chemical and physical phenomena after full-year
courses in chemistry and physics. We find a student giving two
semesters to work in each of these subjects. He spends most of his
time learning the chemical elements, their characteristics and the
modes of testing for them. The major portion of the