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

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My major subject was English; and as part of the work Professor George Rice Carpenter undertook to teach me the art of composition. This was an undergraduate course, taken by students of Columbia College, and so I had a chance to see how they were taught. To my dismay I found it exactly the same dreary routine that I had been through at my City College. Our professor would set us a topic on which to write a “theme”: “Should College Students Take Part in Athletics;” or perhaps, “A Description of the Country in Winter.” My own efforts at this task were pitiful, and I was angrily aware that they were pitiful; I did not care anything about the matters on which I was asked to write, and I could never in my life write about anything I did not care about. I stood some six weeks of it, and then went to the professor and told him I wanted to drop the course.

So I discovered one of the embarrassments of the American college system. Students are supposed to choose courses, but no provision is made for them to sample the wares and make an intelligent selection. If anybody finds he has made a mistake, he is in the same plight as if he has married the wrong girl; he can not get out without hurting the girl’s feelings, and I, unhappy blunderer in the undergraduate machine, had to hurt the feelings of Professor Carpenter. “I don’t know what you want,” said he, “or how you think you are going to get it; but this one thing I can tell you positively—you don’t know how to write.” To which I answered humbly, of course; that was why I had to come to him. But I had become convinced that I wasn’t going to learn in that way, and my mind was made up to drop the course.