Frenzied Fiction, Stephen Leacock [books to read in a lifetime txt] 📗

“The girls,” she answered, “go out in groups anywhere out of doors, and make a Nature Study of anything they see.”

“How do they do that?” I asked.

“Why, they look at it. Suppose, for example, they come to a stream or a pond or anything—”

“Yes—”

“Well, they look at it.”

“Had they never done that before?” I asked.

“Ah, but they look at it as a Nature Unit. Each girl must take forty units in the course. I think we only do one unit each day we go out.”

“It must,” I said, “be pretty fatiguing work, and what about the Excursion?”

“That’s every Saturday. We go out with Miss Stalk, the professor of Ambulation.”

“And where do you go?”

“Oh, anywhere. One day we go perhaps for a trip on a steamer and another Saturday somewhere in motors, and so on.”

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Field Work. The aim of the course—I’m afraid I’m quoting Miss Stalk but I don’t mind, she’s really fine—is to break nature into its elements—”

“I see—”

“So as to view it as the external structure of Society and make deductions from it.”

“Have you made any?” I asked.

“Oh, no”—she laughed—“I’m only starting the work this term. But, of course, I shall have to. Each girl makes at least one deduction at the end of the course. Some of the seniors make two or three. But you have to make one.”

“It’s a great course,” I said. “No wonder you are going to be busy; and, as you say, how much better than loafing round here doing nothing.”

“Isn’t it?” said the girl student with enthusiasm in her eyes. “It gives one such a sense of purpose, such a feeling of doing something.”

“It must,” I answered.

“Oh, goodness,” she exclaimed, “there’s the lunch bell. I must skip and get ready.”

She was just vanishing from my side when the Burly Male Student, who was also staying in the hotel, came puffing up after his five-mile run. He was getting himself into trim for enlistment, so he told me. He noted the retreating form of the college girl as he sat down.

“I’ve just been talking to her,” I said, “about her college work. She seems to be studying a queer lot of stuff—Social Endeavour and all that!”

“Awful piffle,” said the young man. “But the girls naturally run to all that sort of rot, you know.”

“Now, your work,” I went on, “is no doubt very different. I mean what you were taking before the war came along. I suppose you fellows have an awful dose of mathematics and philology and so on just as I did in my college days?”

Something like a blush came across the face of the handsome youth.

“Well, no,” he said, “I didn’t co-opt mathematics. At our college, you know, we co-opt two majors and two minors.”

“I see,” I said, “and what were you co-opting?”

“I co-opted Turkish, Music, and Religion,” he answered.

“Oh, yes,” I said with a sort of reverential respect, “fitting yourself for a position of choir-master in a Turkish cathedral, no doubt.”

“No, no,” he said, “I’m going into insurance; but, you see, those subjects fitted in better than anything else.”

“Fitted in?”

“Yes. Turkish comes at nine, music at ten and religion at eleven. So they make a good combination; they leave a man free to—”

“To develop his mind,” I said. “We used to find in my college days that lectures interfered with it badly. But now, Turkish, that must be an interesting language, eh?”

“Search me!” said the student. “All you have to do is answer the roll and go out. Forty roll-calls give you one Turkish unit—but, say, I must get on, I’ve got to change. So long.”

I could not help reflecting, as the young man left me, on the great changes that have come over our college education. It was a relief to me later in the day to talk with a quiet, sombre man, himself a graduate student in philosophy, on this topic. He agreed with me that the old strenuous studies seem to be very largely abandoned.

I looked at the sombre man with respect.

“Now your work,” I said, “is very different from what these young people are doing—hard, solid, definite effort. What a relief it must be to you to get a brief vacation up here. I couldn’t help thinking to-day, as I watched you moving round doing nothing, how fine it must feel for you to come up here after your hard work and put in a month of out-and-out loafing.”

“Loafing!” he said indignantly. “I’m not loafing. I’m putting in a half summer course in Introspection. That’s why I’m here. I get credit for two majors for my time here.”

“Ah,” I said, as gently as I could, “you get credit here.”

He left me. I am still pondering over our new education. Meantime I think I shall enter my little boy’s name on the books of Tuskegee College where the education is still old-fashioned.