student learns nothing of chemistry, physics, heat, plumbing,
electric wiring, gas-fitting or the use of a blow-torch. Any American
college student can run a motor car, take a gasoline engine to
pieces, fix a washer on a kitchen tap, mend a broken electric bell,
and give an expert opinion on what has gone wrong with the furnace.
It is these things indeed which stamp him as a college man, and
occasion a very pardonable pride in the minds of his parents.

But in all these things the Oxford student is the merest amateur.

This is bad enough. But after all one might say this is only the
mechanical side of education. True: but one searches in vain in
the Oxford curriculum for any adequate recognition of the higher
and more cultured studies. Strange though it seems to us on this
side of the Atlantic, there are no courses at Oxford in Housekeeping,
or in Salesmanship, or in Advertising, or on Comparative Religion,
or on the influence of the Press. There are no lectures whatever
on Human Behaviour, on Altruism, on Egotism, or on the Play of Wild
Animals. Apparently, the Oxford student does not learn these things.
This cuts him off from a great deal of the larger culture of our
side of the Atlantic. "What are you studying this year?" I once
asked a fourth year student at one of our great colleges. "I am
electing Salesmanship and Religion," he answered. Here was a young
man whose training was destined inevitably to turn him into a moral
business man: either that or nothing. At Oxford Salesmanship is
not taught and Religion takes the feeble form of the New Testament.
The more one looks at these things the more amazing it becomes that
Oxford can produce any results at all.

The effect of the comparison is heightened by the peculiar position