The private secondary schools, save those that are frankly designed to relieve parents of recalcitrant boys when the public schools will have no more of them, are pretty much without the ninety-five per cent. of non-college men. Frequently they have their charges for longer periods. So they are free to specialize in cramming with more singleness of mind and at the same time to soften the process as their endowments and atmospheres permit. But at bottom the demand you make of the “prep school” is the same demand your bookkeeper puts on his son’s high school: you want your boy launched into college with the minimum of trouble for yourself and the maximum of practical advantage for him; your bookkeeper wants his boy launched into business with a minimum of frippery and a maximum of marketable skill. One boy is experted into college, the other is experted into business. You are both among those passionate believers in education who impressed the Martian on his first visit. Some educator has announced that the college course should not only provide preparation for life but should itself be a satisfactory portion of life. What college student so dull as not to know that? For the most part, he trusts the faculty to provide the preparation--sometimes it would seem that he dares it to--but he takes jolly good care that the four years shall give him life more abundantly. He has looked forward to them with an impatience not even the indignity of entrance examinations could balk; he will live them to the top of his bent; and he will look back on them tenderly, even sentimentally, as the purplest patch of his days. So the American undergraduate is representative of the American temper at its best. He is the flower of our youth at its moment of perfect bloom, its ideals not yet corrupted, its aspirations unwithered. As he thinks and feels, all America would think and feel if it dared and could. At this point, therefore, the Martian’s inquiry into what we expect from our educational establishment would have to shift its point of view from the older to the younger generation. The Martian would be much in demand at our colleges, both as a sure-fire lecturer and as a shining target for degrees certain to attract wide publicity to the donors. Let us imagine him setting aside a page in his notebook for a scheme of undergraduate emphases, grouped and amended as his triumphant progress permitted him to check up on his observations.