With all respect to President Angell this seems to me the most amazingly misleading series of questions I have ever read from a man of such academic standing. Why try to befuddle the issue by speaking of an “aristocratic” and a “democratic” education? Does he mean by the first a cultural education and by the latter a vocational one? Or does he mean by the first one which can be pursued by intelligent minds and by the second one suited to minds less so? I can readily see the difference between cultural and vocational, and can see that different grades of minds are capable of proceeding to different lengths in the pursuit of either of these two sorts of education, but I fail to see what he means by aristocratic and democratic so applied. The whole series of questions appears to me perilously like an appeal to popular prejudice rather than an honest attempt to set the problem clearly before us. It is clear what he intends by the high-sounding phrase “unquestioned dynamic[Pg 167] of vocational and professional interest.” In plain English it means money-making as an incentive to study and regarded as the end of education. Yet the only alternative Dr. Angell places before the public is what he calls, evidently intending to discredit any alternative, “a stereotyped conception of ‘liberal’ education.” I deny most obstreperously that these are the only alternatives and I do not hesitate to assert that by putting the list of questions as he has, Dr. Angell, so far from doing anything to clarify the public mind on the problem, has done much to befuddle it. Appealing to prejudice by calling vocational training or an inferior quality of cultural education “democratic education” can only mislead the people at large as to what a genuine education is. He might as well speak of democratic truth or democratic fine art or democratic scholarship or democratic beauty. Nor need he confuse the issue by talking of “the upper classes (whatever that may mean in America)” as contrasted with “a robust intellectual life.” Dr. Angell knows as well as anyone that there is a great difference between homes in America as everywhere, and the children in them, though homes and children of the best sort may be found on all economic and social planes and are not limited to any one “class.” He must also realize that under modern conditions, which have given a great economic value to the possession of a college degree, the masses of students that go to college for the sake of acquiring such a degree for business reasons do anything but make their college a “center of robust intellectual life.” I suggest to Dr. Angell that he read that stinging indictment of American collegiate and intellectual life, Lone Voyagers. “Chippewa College” was assuredly not patronized by the children of the upper classes,[Pg 168] but the picture of the student body is all too true to life in such places. “The ambition of the ‘co-eds’ was to teach in a small town high school, not unlike the one where they