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An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker by Cornelia Stratton Parker
page 109 of 164 (66%)
_i.e._, interest, to bounce forth at the clang of a gong. To illustrate:
the student is confidently expected to lose himself in fine
contemplation of Plato's philosophy up to eleven o'clock, and then at
11.07, with no important mental cost, to take up a profitable and
scholarly investigation into the banking problems of the United States.
He will be allowed by the proper academic committee German Composition
at one o'clock, diseases of citrus fruit trees at two, and at three he
is asked to exhibit a fine sympathy in the Religions and Customs of the
Orient. Between 4.07 and five it is calculated that he can with profit
indulge in gymnasium recreation, led by an instructor who counts out
loud and waves his arms in time to a mechanical piano. Between five and
six, this student, led by a yell-leader, applauds football practice. The
growing tendency of American university students to spend their evenings
in extravagant relaxation, at the moving pictures, or in unconventional
dancing, is said to be willful and an indication of an important moral
sag of recent years. It would be interesting also to know if Arkwright,
Hargreaves, Watt, or Darwin, Edison, Henry Ford, or the Wrights, or
other persons of desirable if unconventional mechanical imagination,
were encouraged in their scientific meditation by scholastic experiences
of this kind. Every American university has a department of education
devoted to establishing the most effective methods of imparting
knowledge to human beings."

From the same article:--

"The break in the systematization which an irregular and unpredictable
thinker brings arouses a persistent if unfocused displeasure. Hence we
have the accepted and cultivated institutions, such as our universities,
our churches, our clubs, sustaining with care mediocre standards of
experimental thought. European critics have long compared the repressed
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