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

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Such are the instructors; and the students are what you would expect. One professor said to me: “Not five per cent of my men are thinking about public questions. They take what I teach them as cows in the pasture take rain, something to be endured but not thought about. They come from high schools where they have heard no discussions of vital questions. I have talked with thousands of them; ask anybody in the university and you will get the same answer—their mental life is as dead as the tomb.”

Another professor told how one of his colleagues had brought into his class a former lecturer of the Y. M. C. A. in Siberia, who described to the students the behavior of Semenoff, the Cossack bandit, one of the pets of our State Department. The lecturer had traveled in Semenoff’s train, and had been invited to tea, and Semenoff came in with his tunic spotted with blood, explaining that he had just dispatched a carload of prisoners. He had shot them, one by one, with his own revolver, and left the dead for the American troops to bury. There had been some discussion of the incident in the class, and not a man there thought there was anything wrong about it. “They never batted an eye,” said my informant.