Now, considering the great advance of our higher town schools, which carry their pupils as far as the College carried them fifty years ago, and which might, if necessary, have classes still more advanced of such as are destined for the university, I venture to suggest that the time has come when this whole system of coercion might, with safety and profit, be done away. Abolish, I would say, your whole system of marks, and college rank, and compulsory tasks. I anticipate an objection drawn from the real or supposed danger of abandoning to their own devices and optional employment boys of the average age of college students. In answer, I say, advance that average by fixing a limit of admissible age. Advance the qualifications for admission; make them equal to the studies of the Freshman year, and reduce the college career from four years to three; or else make the Freshman year a year of probation, and its closing examination the condition of full matriculation. Only give the young men, when once a sufficient foundation has been laid, and the rudiments acquired, the freedom of a true University,--freedom to select their own studies and their own teachers from such material, and such _personnel_, as the place supplies. It is to be expected that a portion will abuse this liberty, and waste their years. They do it at their peril. At the peril, among other disadvantages, of losing their degree, which should be conditioned on satisfactory proof that the student has not wholly misspent his time.
An indispensable condition of intellectual growth is liberty. That liberty the present system denies. More and more it is straitened by imposed tasks. And this I conceive to be the reason why, with increased requirements, the College turns out a decreasing proportion of first-class men. If the theory of college rank were correct, the highest marks should indicate the men who are to be hereafter most conspicuous, and leaders in the various walks of life. This is not the case,--not so much so now as in former years. Of the present chief lights of American literature and science, how many, if graduates of Harvard, took the first honors of the University here? Or, to put the question in another form, Of those who took the first honors at Harvard, within the last thirty years, how many are now conspicuous among the great lights of American literature and science?