YOUNG AMERICA.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVI, Issue 282, 1 May 1914, Page 3

YOUNG AMERICA.

| INTERESTING REFERENCES. [ Dr. Starr Jordan, principal of the farai ous Stanford University in California, has been giving Great Thoughts some interesting particulars about the youths of America. "It always seems time," lie said, "that the key to the solutions of the problems of youth is opportunity. Now in America youth is afforded every opportunity —far more, I imagine, than is the case in England. For instance, we have ten time as many Universities as you have; even California, with only two millions of population, has 7f>oo students in its Universities; that is a higher average than any other University in the States. Well, that is affecting the whole lives and prospects of our youth. They a:e trained better for life than ever before; they are being shown the way of life as 1 never beore in the history of the world." The State pays for all tuition and no one ■is deprived of a University education, therefore talent and inborn genius s not thwarted in America as it only too often' is in the older countries. .

Broadly speaking, the United States Universities do not retain the idle, incompetent o.r dissipated men; they e\pel no fewer than 5000 students every year, one-thiid of this number cansist■ins' of rich incompetents. "Our rijh people's children." said Dr. Jordan, "are sometimes very undesirable, and that is absolutely against the whole spirit and genius of America. On the other hand we regard it as a national misfortune when any man who ought to be educated goes through life untrained, Jt is possible for every man to pay his expenses at the University by manual labor 011 farms or "waiting in hotels or steamboats during the summer vacation, and many of our young -students do this." The gilded youth of America is, added Dr Jordan, like the apple—"rotten at the core and quite beyond hope and reclamation."

Asked if he approved of the classics as a training in part for the. business career, Dr. .Jordan made answer:

"We train a man so that whatever he may be he falls on his feet. The keynote of our educational success is going direct to the subject most likely to be useful when a man has decided on his career. A prepared course of study, like a ready-made suit, fits nobody. The man with the best furnished mind is lie who touches life at most points, mid he is not necessarily a classical scholar. All the good students in England, it seems to me, are classical, and you shut out all others. Darwin regarded classic; as so incredibly dull that he could <?et •nothing out of them." The best American students, in Dr. Jordan's opinion, are not classical, French and 'German are just as useful and the scientific medical man is just as good a scholar as the classical man.