It is forty years since John Stuart Mill wrote a
celebrated attack on the English universities, then in a very low
condition, in which he laid it down broadly that the end above all
for which endowed universities ought to exist was "to keep alive
philosophy," leaving "the education of common minds for the common
business of life" for the most part to private enterprise. This
seemed at the time exacting too much, and it doubtless seems so
still; but it is nevertheless true that ever since that period
universities of the highest class, both in Europe and in this
country, have been working in that direction--striving, that is to
say, either to sift the applicants for admission, by imposing
increasingly severe tests, and thus presenting to the professors
only pupils of the highest grade to work upon; or, at all events, if
not repelling the ill-fitted, expending all their strength in
furnishing the highest educational advantages to the well-fitted. In
the last century, Harvard and Yale were doing just the kind of work
that the high schools now do--that is, taking young lads and
teaching them the elements of literature.
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