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

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Most of my experience at Columbia consisted of beginning courses, and dropping them after a few weeks. At the end I figured up that I had sampled over forty courses. I finished five or six, but never took an examination in one. And this was no mere whim or idleness on my part; it was a deliberate judgment upon the university and its methods. I had made the discovery that, being registered for a master’s degree, and not having completed the necessary courses, I was free to register for new courses the second year, without paying additional tuition fees; and failing to complete the courses the second year, I was free to register for the third year, and so on.

Thus I worked out my system—education in spite of the educators! I would start a course, and get a preliminary view of the subject, and the list of the required readings; then I would go off by myself and do the readings. Almost invariably there was one book which the professor used as a text-book, and his lectures were nothing but an inadequate résumé thereof. At the beginning of his course on the drama Brander Matthews would say “Gentlemen, I make it a point of honor with you not to read my book—‘The Development of the Drama,’ until after you have finished my course!”