ver, has been carried
out more than once.

That situation is utterly wrong. We want organization of the
educational system, with each unit cooperating with the next higher, but
if education is to solve the problem of democracy and furnish moral
leadership for American life, we want each unit to be free, first of
all, to serve its own constituency to the best of its power. The
problem is not serious for the big city high school, with its multiplied
elective courses, but for the small rural or town high school, with its
limited corps of teachers and its necessarily fixed courses, the burden
is onerous indeed.

Is the American college and university doing all that it might do in
cultivating moral leadership for American democracy? The last decades
have seen an astounding and unparalleled development of higher education
in America. In the old days, the college was usually on a
denominational foundation. It was supported by the dollars and pennies
of earnest religionists who believed that education was necessary to
religion and morality. The president was generally a clergyman of the
denomination; he taught the ethics course, and all students were
required to take it. There was compulsory chapel attendance, and once a
day the entire student body gathered together to listen to some moral
and religious thought.

Then came the immense expansion of higher education. Courses were
multiplied and diversified. Universities were established or endowed by
the state. Academies became colleges, and colleges, universities.
Institutions were generally secularized. Compulsory chapel attendance
was rightly abandoned. Each department served its own interest apart.
Until to-day certain of our great universities are not unlike vast
intellectual department stores, with each professor calling his goods
across the counter, and the president, a sort of superior floorwalker,
to see that no one clerk gets too many customers. It is an impressive
illustration of what has happened to our higher institutions that, in
certain of them, the one regular meeting place of the entire student
body in a common interest, is the bleachers by the athletic field. One
continues to believe in college athletics, in spite of the frequent
absurdities and worse, done in their name; only if the numbers of those
playing the game and those exercising only their lungs and throats from
the bleachers, were reversed, better all-round athletic education would
resu