If Mr. Huntington, the late railroad king, disapproved of colleges, because their training unfitted the young men for practical life, and discounted their chances for becoming millionaires, the right answer seems to have been given by President Jones of Hobart College. "Boys who have followed science, mathematics, and literature to their best results, are not, upon graduation, anxious to be brokers' runners or bank clerks at five or ten dollars per week, and do not exhibit a dawdling inaccuracy, whatever their pursuits. The fresh graduate Mr. Huntington complained of has usually 'skinned through college,' and has been unsatisfactory there also."[1] He was one of the "students" who found football reports more enticing than the Latin and Greek classics; hence "their shortcomings and their commercial inefficiency are evidently not the results and handicaps of scholarship."
Here we must add that the popular argument against the classical studies is very superficial. We
- ↑ The Forum, Jan. 1901, p. 584. However, in the Report delivered at the Commencement of Yale 1902, President Hadley could quote the following words of a leading employer of railroad labor: "When I want a college man, I want a man who knows that it is hard work to use books that are worth anything; and, as a preparation for railroad service, I would rather have a man who has used one hard book without liking it – a Greek dictionary if you please – than a man who thinks he knows all the experimental science and all the shop work which any school can give him, and has enjoyed it because it is easy." The Yale Alumni Weekly, July 31, 1902, p. 433. – And the Electrical World said recently (October 25) in the article "The College and Business": "In our profession such doubts are settled once for all by the great electrical companies in demanding a college education in those who cast their lot with them for technical training."
