Excerpt from The Creighton Chronicle, Vol. 7: Jan. 20, 1916 The time-honored conception of a college course was that it should evolve and discipline all the mental powers latent in youth, thus effecting an all-around intellectual development which would enable the young man, upon his entrance into the arena of civil life, to meet and solve the problems there confront ing him. Should he desire to pursue thereafter any special course of training, say in one of the learned professions, the university was there to answer his need, whose doors however would open to him only on presentation of his passport, the di ploma of the college testifying to his mental fitness to engage in such special study. Such, for more than two centuries, was the almost universal ly accepted idea of a collegiate education in America, but with the dawn of the nineteenth century, the restlessness so characteristic of American life, the tendency to experiment, which frequently, - but not always - means progress, brought about the injection of new ideas in educational circles. The period was a critically transitional one, especially in two great fields of human activity; first, in that of political economy, the revolt of the democracy against the age-old aristocratic dominance, and secondly, in that of the physical sciences, which then began to foreshadow their boundless potentialities in the way of ministering to human needs and comforts, in the amelioration of physical conditions of living. The increased, and ever daily increasing sum of hu man knowledge made it incumbent upon the schools, according to these progressivists, not to lose any of the precious time of plastic youth, in giving their scholars the special training from childhood up, which would best fit them for the field of their future life-work. Bluntly put, it was an abandonment of the old idea of a liberal education in favor of specialization. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.