Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education онлайн

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Wishing to see just what Harvard men spend their money for, I take the trouble to classify this advertising. There are seven and one-half pages devoted to clothing, three and three-fourths devoted to luxurious hotels, three and one-half devoted to automobiles, and three and one-half to investments of the interlocking directorate, including an invitation to gamble in German marks. One and one-half pages are given to tobacco, one and one-fourth to candy, one and one-fourth to games and sporting goods, one to jewels, one to movies, three-fourths to music, one-fourth to the “Transcript,” one-fourth to art, and one-fourth to books. From the above we may reckon that Harvard students spend thirty times as much on clothes as they spend on books, and fourteen times as much on motor cars as on art. Such is the state of “culture” when teaching is dominated by a vested class, which fears ideas, and forbids all thinking save what is certified to be harmless.

It is a truism in the affairs of the mind, that when you bar one truth, you bar all; and when you refuse to permit students to use their minds, when you withdraw from them the vital stimulus of intellectual conflict—then they go off and get drunk. The last “senior picnic” at Harvard was “a glorified booze party,” so I was told by several who attended. There was a ball game, and certain prominent residents of the “Gold Coast” amused themselves by circulating among the crowd, making filthy remarks to girls. Some of the students became indignant, and wished to take the matter up, knowing that the remedy for such evils lies in publicity. But Mr. Frederick J. Allen, secretary to the Corporation—the same gentleman who made the tactful inquiry about the Wilfred Humphries lecture—pleaded with them to spare the good name of the university. So of course there will be another “glorified booze party” next year; and, needless to say, there will be the useful efforts to make certain that Harvard men do not think any new or vital thought about the issues which are shaping the mind of the world.