Older children might do a good deal before beginning their collegiate
education. What is the matter with our universities is that all the
students are schoolboys, whereas it is of the very essence of university
education that they should be men. The function of a university is not
to teach things that can now be taught as well or better by University
Extension lectures or by private tutors or modern correspondence classes
with gramophones. We go to them to be socialized; to acquire the hall
mark of communal training; to become citizens of the world instead of
inmates of the enlarged rabbit hutches we call homes; to learn manners
and become unchallengeable ladies and gentlemen. The social pressure
which effects these changes should be that of persons who have faced
the full responsibilities of adults as working members of the general
community, not that of a barbarous rabble of half emancipated schoolboys
and unemancipable pedants. It is true that in a reasonable state of
society this outside experience would do for us very completely what the
university does now so corruptly that we tolerate its bad manners only
because they are better than no manners at all. But the university will
always exist in some form as a community of persons desirous of pushing
their culture to the highest pitch they are capable of, not as solitary
students reading in seclusion, but as members of a body of individuals
all pursuing culture, talking culture, thinking culture, above all,
criticizing culture. If such persons are to read and talk and criticize
to any purpose, they must know the world outside the university at least
as well as the shopkeeper in the High Street does. And this is just
what they do not know at present. You may say of them, paraphrasing
Mr. Kipling, "What do they know of Plato that only Plato know?" If our
universities would exclude everybody who had not earned a living by his
or her own exertions for at least a couple of years, their effect would
be vastly improved.